Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Crucial T710 2TB is the middle capacity variant in the company's flagship PCIe 5.0-based NVMe SSD lineup. You can also get it in 1TB and 4TB capacities. The T710 series replaces the T705 series, which in turn replaced the T700 series. The T710 we are reviewing today does not come with a heatsink from the factory, and no heatsink version is available at the time of writing this review, but the company does say it is coming soon. For this non-heatsink variant, you will get a sticker, as shown in our photo above. Cooling will depend on the heatsink that comes with your motherboard, or you can pick up something like the SilverStone TP05. The Crucial T710 2TB is physically compatible with the PlayStation 5, since the total thickness is below 11.25mm.
The Crucial T710 2TB is an M.2 2280 format SSD. If you are not familiar with the M.2 physical standard, M.2 2280 means the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm, hence its numerical designation. Its components are located on the black printed circuit board located behind the label, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. The Crucial T710 2TB works on the NVMe 2.0 logical device interface, and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 5.0. The T710 uses four lanes for up to 16,000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The weight is unspecified, but I cannot imagine it to be any heavier than any other M.2 2280 format SSD.
Flip the Crucial T710 2TB around, and you will find no components of interest. The labels on this side of the Crucial T710 SSD carries miscellaneous information such as its model name, capacity, serial number, and regulatory certifications. Other than that, it is completely blank, as all the components are located on the other side. This SSD is assembled in Malaysia, which is the same as models like the T500 2TB.
Remove the label and zoom in a bit, and you can see what the Crucial T710 2TB is made from. There are four key components that can be seen. At the heart of Crucial's T710 2TB is a Silicon Motion SM2508. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to utilize the bandwidth afforded by the PCIe 5.0 standard. The SM2508 is built on TSMC's 6nm process, features a quad core ARM Cortex R8 CPU, eight NAND channels, and uses only 3.5W maximum in active mode. The controller also has native full drive encryption support. A Micron D8CSG, decoded as MT53E512M32D1ZW-046, LPDDR4-2133 2GB memory chip is present. It is used by the controller for system memory. SSD DRAM is used as a cache for writing data to the drive and storing a table that maps where each logical block address is physically located on the NAND flash memory.
The Crucial T710's flash memory are Micron-branded G9 276-layer triple-level cells in two chips labeled NY307, which translates to the part number MT29F8T08EQLEHL5-24QA:E. Its rated write endurance is an excellent 1200TBW, which equates to about 660GB per day for five years. On a per-gigabyte level, it is the same as the Crucial T500 2TB, Crucial P510 1TB, and WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB at 600TBW/TB, but much lower than performance drives like the Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB at 1000TBW/TB and Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB at 1000TBW/TB. Its rated power consumption is not published. 48GB out of the 2048GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 1TB, as advertised. You will see 1.81TB in Windows.
Specified at 14500MB/s read, 13800MB/s write, up to 2,200,000 IOPS read and 2,300,000 write over NVMe 2.0 on PCIe 5.0 x4, these figures are impressive for a flagship M.2 2280 model. It is about twice as fast as previous generation PCIe 4.0-based drives. To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the T710 2TB against other Crucial models to see how this flagship PCIe 5.0-based drive steps up against their mainstream PCIe 5.0-based P510 1TB as well as previous generation SSDs in the next seven pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D15 G2 HBC
RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5-8400 2x24GB
Motherboard: ASUS ProArt Z890-Creator WiFi
Graphics: Integrated
Chassis: be quiet! Light Base 600 LX
Storage: Crucial T500 2TB, Crucial P310 2280 2TB (Heatsink Version)
Power: Seasonic PRIME TX-1300 ATX 3.0 1300W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Crucial T710 2TB
- Crucial P310 2230 2TB
- Crucial P310 2280 1TB
- Crucial P510 1TB
- Crucial T500 2TB
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 11
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
