INTRODUCTION

    If someone had asked me just 1 year ago today if I could see myself having many Gen5 PCIe M.2 NVMe SSDs at the same time in the lab I'd probably had said it's hard but well, here we are and yes, quite a few have found their way in the lab. Silicon Motion, Phison and MaXio have all released their 2nd generation Gen5 NAND flash controllers and so it's no surprise that the market is quickly filled with brand new SSD models. The brand new T710 by Crucial is among those models and for the past month I've been testing the 2TB variant.

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    The brand new T710 line of M.2 Gen5 SSDs by Crucial is currently available in three capacities (1/2/4TB) and ships with or without a large black heatsink (according to marketing pictures it also has an RGB LED in it). For the T710 line Crucial has used the SM2508 NVMe 2.0 controller by Silicon Motion (6nm lithography) which they've paired with their very own (Micron) G9 276-layer 3D TLC NAND flash and 2GB of LPDDR4 DRAM (2133MHz/4266MT/s) for the 2TB model. The Silicon Motion SM2508 NVMe 2.0 controller features an quad-core ARM Cortex R8 CPU with support for 4 PCIe lanes of 32Gb/s data transfer speed (Gen5 x4), 8 NAND channels with a speed of up to 3600MT/s per channel and packs various technologies including end to end data path protection, programmable firmware interface, SRAM ECC & CRC parity, Innovative LDPC ECC engine, embedded programmable RAID, real-time full-drive AES 128/256bit encryption, hardware SHA 256/384 and TRNG, secure boot for FW authentication, built-in smart clock-gating mechanism (highly efficient power consumption), ONFI 5.0 and Toggle 5.0 support and TCG Opal 2.0 compliance. As for warranty Crucial covers the entire T710 line with a 5-year limited warranty and regarding endurance they report an TBW of 600 for the 1TB capacity, 1200 for the 2TB capacity and 2400 for the 4TB capacity.