Crucial’s PCIe 5.0 SSD Throttles to HDD Speeds Without Cooler, but Avoids Thermal Shutdown
Early samples of the Crucial T700 are poised to be the fastest consumer SSD when retail units hit the retail market on May 30th. There is no doubt that the T700 or one of its competitors will soon destroy the list of best SSDs.
Corsair’s competing MP700 has recently come under the spotlight due to several scenarios in which reviewers tested the SSD without a cooler, contrary to Corsair’s recommendations. The publication didn’t run the test in bad faith, just to see what would happen if PCIe 5.0 ran without a heatsink or cooler. Experimentation revealed a flaw in the MP700’s firmware related to the thermal throttle curve. Phison’s firmware engineering team immediately addressed this issue and prepared a fix for the firmware update, which is currently undergoing internal validation.
The T700 and MP700 share similar components. Both SSDs use the Phison PS5026-E26 PCIe 5.0 controller and Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. For Crucial, the T700 utilizes a slightly faster NAND (clocked at 2,000 MT/s) than the (1,600 MT/s) variants of other E26-powered drives. NAND in the upper bins gives the T700 sequential read and write speeds of up to 12.4 GB/s and 11.8 GB/s. However, although the T700 and MP700 use the same E26 controller and similar Micron NAND, they do not use the same firmware.
Larger and more prominent vendors have their own firmware teams working on SSD firmware. However, smaller brands, or brands less deeply involved in the SSD space, rely on reference firmware provided by manufacturers. The rules depend on the manufacturer of his SSD controller. Some, like Silicon Motion, have full control over the firmware, others don’t.
In the case of Phison, the company does firmware customization for customers. In this case it would be Corsair and Crucial. So the T700 and MP700 do not have the same firmware. Vendors don’t make firmware. Given that these two drives exhibit different failure mechanisms, it’s safe to assume that the firmware is different. Either way, the MP700 firmware was clearly flawed. And the solution seems to be as simple as tweaking the thermal throttle curve. That’s why Phison was able to craft a fix so quickly.
image 1 of 2
I haven’t had any serious issues with Crucial’s PCIe 5.0 drives, but running them without a cooler doesn’t fix the problem.german publications computer based (opens in new tab) CrystalDiskMark pointed out that the T700 suffered from thermal throttling when the heatsink wasn’t cooling the drive. The SSD reportedly reached a temperature of 86 degrees Celsius. The SSD was heavily throttled as evidenced by write speeds stuck around 100 MB/s. Feedback for this publication is consistent with our experience. His T700 sample without a heatsink performed fine in tests like DiskBench, but experienced thermal throttling in long-running benchmarks like CrystalDiskMark and IOmeter. His average write performance after 15 minutes recorded on the bare drive was 1,027 MB/s, lower than his 3,681 MB/s on the drive with the heatsink. Thermal throttling was working as expected. In all honesty, if your drive is capable of write speeds close to 12 GB/s, you won’t be writing continuously for nearly 15 minutes in most mainstream use cases.
Crucial sells the T700 in two versions, one with a bare drive and one with a heatsink. The price difference is $30. However, just because it’s a bare drive doesn’t mean you should run a PCIe 5.0 SSD without a heatsink or cooler. In fact, Crucial, like Corsair, advises customers to use heatsinks for their PCIe 5.0 SSDs.
The bare drive version is aimed at consumers who plan to use the motherboard’s integrated M.2 heatsink with the T700. This is similar to how Intel stopped shipping the stock cooler with the chipmaker’s K-series processors because enthusiasts frequently ditched the stock cooler and bought an aftermarket cooler. Depending on your choice of motherboard, CPU cooler, and graphics card, combining a rugged M.2 cooler may not be possible. So while Crucial’s T700 bare drive offers consumers an option to save $30, especially if you’re doing a lot of sequential writes, make sure your motherboard has a cooler that you can bolt onto the drive. need to do it.
