Crucial T710 2 TB NVMe SSD review

Right, let me be clear here. Crucial's T710 is without a doubt an all-out assault against the majesty that is Sandisk's WDSN8100. Without question, that drive is the best PCIe 5.0 SSD out there today and has been for a few months now. Certainly as far as performance is concerned. But no crown can remain untouched forever, and Crucial is looking to ruffle a few electron-induced feathers in its attempt to pull out that red carpet from underneath Sandisk. This is the very best that Micron can muster right now, I've no doubt.

For those not in the know, Crucial is actually Micron's consumer-oriented brand. Micron the massive american memory manufacturer. That gives it a distinct advantage over its competitors, as it can just use its own NAND flash in the production of its drives. Not only does that mean it can reserve its best tech for its OEM and off-the-shelf solutions, but there's no middleman or NAND manufacturer taking a cut of the profits before the drive hits the shelves, and that might make all the difference here. I'll explain why in a little bit.

As for the hardware side of things. At first glance, on the surface at least, there's not a huge amount of disparity between the T710 and its SN8100 rival. Phison's controller line has been ditched entirely, and like many others in the arena right now, Silicon Motion's anointed prodigal son, the SM2508 PCIe 5.0 controller, has been picked instead. All in a bid to claim back Crucial's crown as king of the SSD hill.

That controller, is of course, the same headline-grabbing unit that's been littering all manner of drives of late. From Biwin's X570 Pro to Acer's Predator GM9000 as well, among many, many others. It comes complete with an eight-channel design operating at 3,600 MT/s brought about off the back of an Arm Cortex architecture built on TSMC's 6 nm manufacturing process. With that comes a dedicated DRAM cache, utilizing LPDDR4 @ 4,266 MT/s. And it is not slow, not one bit, at least not when it's paired with the right NAND.

And that's, of course, the biggest difference. Micron's taken the gloves off and has paired that with its proprietary 276-layer 3D TLC NAND in a bid to really max out that controller. It's the company's densest, fastest NAND to date, with an incredibly small footprint, and far outpaces the likes of its own 232-layer found on the Crucial T705 and T700, those early-day debut PCIe 5.0 drives from yesteryear.

Now, that does all sound very promising, and in the world of marketing, bigger number is better, as we well know. Certainly compared to the 218-layer BiCS8 NAND found in the SN8100. But how these two technologies operate is vastly different from one another.

Although Micron's NAND does indeed contain more effectively stacked vertical layers, giving it a higher density upwards and a smaller footprint, that 218-layer BiCS8 NAND Sandisk has at its fingertips from its joint venture with Kioxia has a reportedly far more efficient layout as well, but it's done this by optimizing not only the vertical layout but also the lateral layout too, reducing the need for vertical stacks.

That 218-layer NAND also effectively has a vastly different architectural philosophy, called CBA or CMOS directly Bonded to Array, as it decouples the CMOS utilized for each cell wafer in the manufacturing process and then bonds them together afterwards separately. That allows each component to be manufactured in the best conditions possible for that part, and then they're effectively "welded" together afterwards, rather than having the CMOS componentry underneath each NAND wafer manufactured in a single pass. It's clever stuff.

So what that leads to then are two drives that are seriously pushing the limits of the PCIe 5.0 standard. The T710 absolutely monsters through our benchmark suite, with 14,145 MB/s on read and 13,181 MB/s on the write. As for the Random 4K results, it puts in a good showing here as well with 104 MB/s on read and 354 MB/s on the write. Both really good numbers. In fact, that 4K write speed is the fastest I've seen to date. But there's a problem. The 4K read speed (arguably the more important figure for gamers) is still slower by a good 14 MB/s compared to the SN8100, and those sequential figures fall around 5 to 6% short on average as well.

PC Gamer test bench
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | RAM: 64 GB (2x32GB) Team Group T-Create Expert DDR5 @ 6000 C34 | GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super | Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi/NZXT N9 X870E | CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | PSU: 1200W NZXT C1200 (2024) 80+ Gold | Chassis: Geometric Future Model 5

Unsurprisingly that translates across to gaming too, and although the T710 puts in a good effort, with a final score of 6.834 seconds for Final Fantasy (still stupidly quick, let's be clear) it doesn't quite beat out the SN8100 at a staggering 6.509 seconds. Those numbers translate over to 3DMark's storage bench as well, with a colossal win for the SN8100 (mostly off the back of far improved latency).

The T710, though, does have one edge, and that's the temperature. Even with an increased ambient spike of around 6 degrees, it was 5 degrees cooler than the SN8100 under the same testing conditions. Impressive, to say the least.

So, scores are impressive, far better than the T705 and T700, and it does hold its own admirably against the SN8100 (even if it does fall slightly short in some areas), but is this little SSD really worth it? Yes. Absolutely, and for one reason and one reason alone.

It's bringing the price of these drives dramatically down, and rapidly at that. Similar to Sandisk, Micron has that in-house NAND advantage, and because of that, it can actively compete on the pricing front. To put it into perspective, right now, the 2 TB SN8100 is $230, exactly the same price as the T710. At launch when I reviewed it, it was $280. That's a $50, or 22%, price drop in less than a dozen weeks. Because the flagship prices are dropping, everything else—PCIe 5.0, 4.0, big bulk storage, budget drives, you name it—all have to drop with it, and that is phenomenal. So well done, Crucial; what a hell of a show you've put on.