If it’s pure read speed you’re after, few SSDs can touch the Crucial T705. It comes with some caveats, and you’ll probably need a new PC to use it, but if you want the fastest storage, this drive is having its time in the limelight as the speediest option.
For
Breakneck sequential speed
Available up to 4 TB
Easy to install M.2 form factor
Against
PCIe 5 motherboard required
Expensive
Not for everyone
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With its PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and claimed sequential read speed of 13,600 MB/s, the Crucial T705 is not a drive for everybody. You’ll need a PCIe 5.0 slot on your motherboard, or you’re paying a premium for nothing. A heatsink is mandatory, and the drive can be purchased with one if your motherboard doesn’t have it already.
And you’ll also need a good reason to have it, as PCIe 4.0 drives are still perfectly fast enough for most uses. Just wanting to have the biggest numbers is a perfectly acceptable reason: as of the time of writing, this is the fastest PC SSD you can get, and deserves its place in our list of the best SSDs for workstations.
Key specifications
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Capacity:
1TB, 2TB (tested), 4TB
Form factor:
M.2 2280
Interface:
PCIe 5.0
Dimensions:
22 x 80 x 2.4mm
Weight:
10g
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Design and features
• Slim M.2 drive • Needs a heatsink
The internal nature and M.2 form factor of the Crucial T705 mean it’s not much to look at. It’s destined to spend its time being completely invisible, tucked away in a slot on a PC motherboard under a heat sink, giving itself away only as a drive icon in an Explorer window.
However, just because it’s not festooned with blinking RGB lights or a monitor on an anglepoise arm, it doesn’t mean the T705 isn’t impressive. It’s a double-sided M.2 2280 SSD with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface using the NVMe 2.0 protocol. Its 232 layers of TLC flash across a 70 mm² die and a gigabyte of Micron LPDDR4 cache give it an incredible data transfer rate that makes it suitable only for PC motherboards that support it. You’re not going to want to put one in your PS5.
And it’s questionable whether a drive like this is required at all. You’ll pay almost twice as much for this drive as you will for a PCIe 4.0 Crucial P3 Plus SSD in the same capacity, and outside of synthetic benchmarks, you might not see a lot of difference. The small background file transfers that go on all the time in Windows, and which were accelerated so noticeably when we moved to SSDs from spinning hard drives, are already fast enough that you won’t really notice the difference a PCIe 5.0 drive can make in things like startup times or apps loading. What it will have an effect on are file transfers from other similarly fast drives, such as copying 4K video, while game loading times may improve too, though not by as much.
Design score: 4/5
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Performance
• Exceptional sequential read speed • You'll need a new PC
Crucial claims a sequential read speed of 13,600 MB/s for the T705, with a write speed of 10,200 MB/s. In one of our tests, CrystalDiskMark, it actually managed more than that, registering a sequential read speed of 14,125.62 MB/s, which is huge. In the same test, the write speed was 12,132.43, also faster than Crucial’s own figures.
Other tests were less forgiving, at least for sequential data. AS SSD Benchmark showed a read speed of 9965.35 MB/s, with 10,452 MB/s writes, while ATTO Disk Benchmark peaked with read speeds of 13,500 MB/s and writes of 10,130 MB/s. In 3D Mark, we saw average bandwidth figures, which combine multiple tests and aren’t just sequential data, of 703.4 MB/s for the T705.
For comparison, a PCIe 3.0 drive we happened to find in a drawer produced reads of 2596.48 MB/s and writes of 1813.2 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark and an average bandwidth figure of 370.84MB/s in 3D Mark, while the PCIe 4.0 drive inside a mini PC managed CrystalDiskMark reads of 4752.86 MB/s and writes of 1643.62 MB/s with a 3D Mark average of 193.17 MB/s (which may be due to thermal throttling inside the small case), showing what an upgrade the T705 is over older drives. The only problem is you’ll need a whole new motherboard, and therefore a whole new PC, to take advantage of it. Whether this is a bad thing or not depends on how much you enjoy building a PC from a pile of parts.
Performance score: 5/5
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Price
At £239.99 in the UK and $290.99 in the US for the 2TB variant, this is an expensive drive, with Crucial’s own P500 PCIe 4.0 drive saving you significant cash if you don’t need the PCIe 5.0 speeds. If you can make use of the T705’s blazing fast transfer rates, however, it’s the one to get right now.
Value score: 3/5
Who is it for?
• Video editors
You’ll need a PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot in your motherboard to even consider the T705, and you’ll also have the kind of workload in mind that can be shortened by the fastest available data transfers. Perhaps you move terabytes of video files from external drives over Thunderbolt, or want 8K footage to scrub more smoothly - if so, this is for you.
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Crucial T705 SSD score card
Attributes
Notes
Rating
Design and features:
M.2 drives are amazingly small for what they offer.
4/5
Performance:
Incredible data transfer speeds
5/5
Value:
A PCIe 4.0 drive is much cheaper and almost as good for most uses.
2/5
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Buy it if...
You need the fastest data transfer available right now
Your PC motherboard supports it
You don’t mind the cost
Don't buy it if...
Anything else will do
You don't need a new computer right now
The Verdict
9.5
out of 10
Crucial T705
If it’s pure read speed you’re after, few SSDs can touch the Crucial T705. It comes with some caveats, and you’ll probably need a new PC to use it, but if you want the fastest storage, this drive is having its time in the limelight as the speediest option.
Ian Evenden has been a journalist for over 20 years, starting in the days of QuarkXpress 4 and Photoshop 5. He now mainly works in Creative Cloud and Google Docs, but can always find a use for a powerful laptop or two. When not sweating over page layout or photo editing, you can find him peering at the stars or growing vegetables.
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