Early testing shows PCIe 5.0 SSDs inch closer to their max potential

The T700's optional heatsink is installed on the right. (credit: Crucial)

It's still not a good time to buy a PCIe 5.0 SSD. With faster options, less monstrous heatsinks, and lower prices all expected to hit the market eventually, it's wise to wait if you can. Consumer-grade drives started rolling out earlier this year, and this week, reviewers shared early testing results for the Crucial T700 PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD scheduled for May. Being heralded as "the fastest consumer SSD in the world, at least for now," it gets closer to the communication bus's max potential than current options.

But we're still working with speeds under the spec's 14,000MBps theoretical max speed, a heatsink that is improved in size but still chunky, and likely high prices. Crucial hasn't shared MSRPs for the 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB capacities coming out, but we can expect them to be as large as the drive's optional heatsink.

Some caveats

Various publications this week published benchmark results for engineering samples of the 2TB T700. The performance of the final version made available to shoppers may differ. According to PCMag, Micron (which owns Crucial) expects to optimize random writes and power consumption. There are also "regulatory hurdles" and Trusted Computing Group's Opal specifications to address and firmware to finalize.

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