Crucial's fastest SSD goes on sale

Crucial has presented its fastest SSD to date in the M.2 card format. With the T710, the manufacturer is following the trend of using controllers from the supplier Silicon Motion. The SM2508 replaces the Phison E26 of the predecessor T705.

This reduces the maximum electrical power consumption to less than 10 watts, which in turn makes cooling easier. At the same time, the maximum transfer speed increases. Crucial itself specifies up to 14.9 GByte/s read and 13.8 GByte/s write. We measured a good 14.5 and 13.1 GByte/s respectively with our 2-TByte test sample – a slight improvement over the T705. The T710 also requires an M.2 slot with four PCI Express 5.0 lanes for this.

Sometimes faster, sometimes slower

The accesses to random memory addresses depend heavily on the system. Crucial itself specifies high values of up to 2.3 million IOPS. Our test system does not achieve figures above two million IOPS across all manufacturers. However, the measured almost 1.4 million IOPS read are still very good. Only the write accesses of the T710 drop compared to the T705, in our case by a quarter to just over 1.1 million IOPS.

Similarly, the T710 loses performance in the PCMark 10 benchmark. In the so-called Full System Drive Benchmark, the score drops by a fifth to just under 4400. The test evaluates how well an SSD is suitable as a system drive with an installed operating system. Such a high drop is surprising – but the T710 is still well suited for this purpose.

A full test of the Crucial T710 will soon be published in c't and on heise online, together with a comparison of other current high-end SSDs.

First retailer listings

Crucial recommends prices for the T710 of 180 euros for one TByte of storage, 275 euros for 2 TByte and 500 euros for 4 TByte. The versions with heat sinks cost 20 euros more each. The first retailers are already listing the coolerless SSDs at slightly lower prices. This puts Crucial's T710 at the same level as high-end SSDs from other manufacturers, such as Samsung's SSD 9100 Pro and Sandisk's WD Black 8100.

Delivery should begin within the next few weeks.

Empfohlener redaktioneller Inhalt

Mit Ihrer Zustimmung wird hier ein externer Preisvergleich (heise Preisvergleich) geladen.

Preisvergleiche immer laden Preisvergleich jetzt laden

Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit können personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen (heise Preisvergleich) übermittelt werden. Mehr dazu in unserer Datenschutzerklärung.

(mma)