The Crucial T710 (starts at $199.99 for 1TB, $359.99 for 2TB as tested) is the latest of a growing number of PCI Express 5 internal SSDs designed to reduce the oppressive heat that these speedsters tend to generate under load. Although capable of use with a more modest heatsink than the Crucial T705 requires—the company has announced such a heatsink replete with purple lighting, for bundling with the T710—the T710's performance lags behind its Editors' Choice-winning predecessor according to our tests. (Its overall performance is largely in the lower middle of the Gen 5 pack.) Still, it's a perfectly capable M.2 drive, and if you can find it on sale, it is a very good alternative to the WD Black SN8100, our top recommendation for Gen 5 SSDs, if drive-heat management is key to your installation.

Design: Flush With NAND Flash

The Crucial T710 is a four-lane solid-state drive running the NVMe 2.0 protocol over a PCIe 5.0 bus. This internal SSD comes in the standard M.2 Type-2280 "gumstick" format. The drive uses Micron 276-layer G9 3D TLC NAND flash chips and a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, which is designed for both high performance and energy efficiency. (Puzzled by some of these terms? Check out our handy guide to SSD terminology.)

The SM2508 is the first non-Phison controller that Micron has used in a Gen 5 SSD. Micron's two previous Crucial flagship models, the Crucial T700 and T705, use Phison's PS5026-E26 controller—as does nearly every other PCIe 5.0 SSD released in 2024 or earlier. (The Crucial P510, geared more to mainstream users, uses Phison's DRAM-less E31T controller.) More drives using the SM2508 controller are in the pipeline; the only other one that we have reviewed so far is the Lexar NM1090 Pro, whose performance falls a bit short of the T710's.

Currently, Micron sells the Crucial T710 without a heatsink, although the company has said that it will soon introduce a compact heatsink replete with purple lighting to add some pizzazz to a desktop rig with a see-through case. The drive's "one-sided" design (the chips are all on the same side of the printed circuit board) keeps its Z-height low and lets it fit, with the added heatsink, into a PlayStation 5's secondary M.2 SSD slot.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

System Requirements: Buy, Build, or Mod

PCIe 5.0 SSDs—even ones with considerably lower throughput speeds than the T710—promise a major boost in peak speeds over PCIe 4.0 drives, but you can take advantage of PCIe 5.0 only if you have recent hardware that supports the standard. Only the latest boutique desktops and a select few high-end laptops are likely to be PCIe 5.0-ready off the shelf, so you may have to build your own PC from the ground up or update an existing system to gain the required connectivity. The oldest Intel and AMD platforms that have PCIe 5.0 support are Intel 12th Gen Core CPUs with motherboards based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset; or AMD Ryzen 7000 processors with an AM5 motherboard built around an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset.

However, just because you have one of those chipsets or a newer one doesn't guarantee that the motherboard maker actually implemented a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 SSD slot. That's up to the board maker, so check your system's or motherboard's specs and documentation to make sure you actually have such a slot before investing in one of these drives. Some boards have PCIe 5.0 expansion slots for graphics cards and other PCI Express cards, but you need one or more PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slots, specifically.

The T710 is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. Here's a breakdown of the currently available capacities and their cost per gigabyte at each drive's list price. It's interesting to see the cost per gig drop with higher capacities here. (More often, the inverse is true at capacities like 4TB.)

Durability and Warranty: Typical of Gen 5 Sticks

As for durability, expressed as lifetime write capacity in total terabytes written (TBW), the T710 matches the Crucial T700, T705, and P510 in the capacities they share. Its durability rating is a notch below the Corsair MP700 Pro, the ADATA Legend 970, and the Aorus 10000, which are rated at 700TBW for 1TB and 1,400TBW for 2TB. The Seagate FireCuda 540 is the reigning Gen 5 durability champ, with ratings of 1,000TBW for the 1TB stick and 2,000TBW for 2TB.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The terabytes-written spec is a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells may begin to fail and get taken out of service. The Micron warranty covers the T710 for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first. But the drive's durability rating is such that unless you're writing unusually large amounts of data to the SSD, it's a safe bet that the T710 will last the full warranty period and well beyond.

The T710 supports AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption, which is the gold standard in data encryption, and it meets the TCG/Opal V2.01+ security standard for self-encrypted devices. Also, Micron offers a free downloadable version of Acronis True Image cloning, backup, and data transfer software specifically for Crucial SSDs.

Performance: Zippy Sequential and Random Throughput

In benchmarking the T710, we used our latest testbed PC, designed specifically for benchmarking PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs. It is built around an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard with an AMD X670 chipset, 32GB of DDR5 memory, one PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot (with lanes that have direct access to the CPU), and three PCIe 4.0 slots. The system sports an AMD Ryzen 9 7900 CPU using an AMD stock cooler; a GeForce RTX 2070 Super graphics card with 8GB of GDDR6 SDRAM; and a Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 Snow 750-watt power supply. The boot drive is an ADATA Legend 850 PCIe 4.0 SSD. (The reviewed SSD is tested as a secondary data drive.) All this hardware is housed in a Praxis Wetbench open-frame case. The motherboard employs an air-cooled (fan-based) heatsink that can be placed over an SSD being tested in the PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, as I did when benchmarking the T710.

We put the T710 through our usual internal solid-state drive benchmarks: Crystal DiskMark 6.0, UL's PCMark 10 Storage, and UL's 3DMark Storage benchmark. The last measures a drive's performance in several gaming-related load and launch tasks. Among the comparison drives seen in the tables below, I included not only most of the Gen 5 SSDs we have reviewed, but two of the best-performing PCI Express 4.0 SSDs we have come across: the WD Black SN850X and Micron's own Crucial T500.

Crystal DiskMark Testing

Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. We use this test to determine if our tested speeds align with the manufacturer's rated speeds.

The T710's Crystal DiskMark sequential read speed was a hair off its rating, and its write score was 2.7% below its rating, but they are still excellent scores if a little below the very fastest Gen 5 drives we have reviewed (the WD Black SN8100, Samsung 9100 Pro, and SK Hynix Platinum P51).

In Crystal DiskMark, the random 4K (small-file) read score was the second highest, behind the WD SN8100 but nearly 10% better than the next-fastest PCI Express 5 SSD in our comparison group. (The Crucial T500, a PCI Express 4 speedster, actually had the third-highest score in this test, beating out all the other Gen 5 drives except the T710 and WD SN8100.) The T710's 4K write score was the third highest, near the top of a closely spaced group that comprised the majority of the PCIe 5 drives we compared it with. Good 4K write performance is especially important for an SSD used as a boot drive, though we test them as secondary drives.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

PCMark 10 Testing

The PCMark 10 Overall Storage test measures an SSD's speed in performing a variety of routine tasks such as launching Windows, loading games and creative apps, and copying both small and large files. The T710's score on this benchmark was in the lower middle of the Gen 5 pack, with a score a shade behind a group of four PCIe 5 SSDs and ahead of the Lexar NM1090 Pro and the two DRAM-less Gen 5 SSDs.

Of the individual tests that make up the PCMark 10 overall score, the T710 had a reasonably quick Windows boot score but came in lower than many of its Gen 5 rivals on the game-launching tests.

3DMark Storage Testing

The 3DMark Storage benchmark tests an SSD's proficiency in performing various gaming-related tasks. In it, the T710 turned in the third-lowest score among our comparison group, ahead of just the Lexar NM1090 Pro and the previous-gen Crucial T500.

Based on its benchmark scores, the Crucial T710 is best for straight-line file transfers, copying, archiving, and accessing data. As expected, it performed better than the Crucial P510, Crucial's recent mainstream Gen 5 SSD, in PCMark 10 Overall Storage and the majority of that benchmark's trace tests. However, it lagged its predecessor, the T705, and most of the other Gen 5 drives in its PCMark 10 results. And in the 3DMark gaming benchmark, it recorded the second-lowest score in our test set, ahead of the Lexar NM1090 but lagging the other drives, both Gen 5 and Gen 4.