And so the steam train of SSD speeds keeps moving. It wasn’t so long ago that we thought things were doing so well when we saw SATA speeds of 540MB/s jump to over 1GB/s…and then 2GB/s to 3.5GB/s which doubled again and is now doubling once more. To those on the outside, it seems like such a simple jump but it really isn’t. Manufacturers understand that theoretical performance ceilings weren’t always within an arms reach and, to get where Phison has today at 14GB/s, has been a lot of work and endless hours of frustration and failure, as all end successes are.
We mentioned Phison above because it is the success of their PS5026-E26 controller tied in with Micron’s 232-layer NAND that makes our review today possible, the Crucial T705. Pushing the limit of SSDs just a bit, this SSD will bring us to 14.5GB/s read and 12.7GB/s write data transfer speeds which lands us right smack in the world of artificial intelligence…or AI. Myself, I like to describe everything as being on the inside or outside. Those on the outside don’t care much about how we got there but they are happy to use such things as online banking, online travel, and instant everything in our world. Those on the inside need to understand the nuts and bolts of just about every aspect and AI is going to change everything. AI is going to be the direct result of faster data transfer as we are reporting on today… and AI is going to change your world just as much as the internet has, whether we are ready for it or not.
The Crucial T705 is a PCIE 5.0 4-lane (x4) SSD built on the Phison PS5026-E26 8-channel NVMe SSD controller that is NVMe 2.0 compliant. If this sounds just a bit familiar, let us thank you for following along with The SSD Review as we recently posted our review of the Phison Gen5 Max14um SSD Reference Design and these two SSDs are the spitting image of one another. Not only will you find the speeds remarkably similar, but also, you may discover just a bit of unintentional plagiarism between the two reports. There is a very distinct difference though. You can’t go out and buy the Phison reference design anytime soon.
The Phison E26 controller is paired with Micron’s best 232-layer TLC NAND flash memory on a black printed circuit board which is of a 2280 form factor (22mm wide x 80mm long), the typical size for most SSDs these days. There is also a LPDDR4 DRM chip separating the controller and memory, based on a 1GB/1TB ratio size and the memory consists of 2 x 512GB size packages on each side of the SSD which provides for a total available capacity of 1863GB when formatted. This SSD has Dynamic SLC caching which accounts for about 11% of that user capacity, as well as Adaptive Thermal Protection which kicks in at 81C. The SSD will shut down should temps make it up to 90C.
The Crucial T705 will be available in 1, 2 and 4TB capacities and has AES256 encryption, TCG OPAL 2.01 support, ECC, data protection for power loss events, active garbage collection, TRIM support as well as RAIN (Redundant Array of independent NAND). It can be purchased as an SSD alone or with its premium heatsink, and we will give a very healthy warning with respect to removing the heatsink; it will rip the controller right off of the SSD. Don’t do it. This is the very first time that we will not be showing component pictures but I would bet that if you referred to that of our Phison Max14mum Report, they are EXACTLY the same.
1TB
2TB
4TB
Seq reads2 (MB/s)
13,600
14,500
14,100
Seq writes2 (MB/s)
10,200
12,700
12,600
Random reads2 (K IOPS)
1,400
1,550
1,500
Random writes2 (K IOPS)
1,750
1,800
1,800
Endurance (TBW)
600
1,200
2,400
The Crucial T705 Gen5 SSD comes with a limited 5-year warranty that becomes void if you rip the controller off. It has three different form factors, T705 with and without a heatsink, along with a limited edition white heatsink. MSRP is listed at $239.99 (1TB), $399.99 (2TB) and $689.99 (4TB) without heatsink, $259.99 (1TB), $439.99 (2TB) and $729.99 (4TB) with heatsink, along with $483.99 for the T705 2TB Limited Edition White release. Check Amazon for T705 availability and pricing (link).
Now let’s get to some speeds shall we?