Performance You Can Rely On

If you’re looking for one of the fastest NVMe SSDs on the market, then Crucial’s T710 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD is the drive you’re looking for. With read and write speeds up to 14.9GB/s, this drive shatters data transfer records and puts itself in a league of its own. But, is Crucial’s T710 the right SSD for you? The answer isn’t as clear as you might think.

Price and Availability

The Crucial T710 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD comes in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB storage options for $180, $280, and $550 respectively. Though, the drive has already dropped in price at Amazon for all three storage sizes. It’s also available to purchase through Newegg.

This SSD Is Fast

The first thing I did when I installed Crucial’s T710 NVMe SSD in my system was run CrystalDiskMark on it to benchmark its performance. Needless to say, this drive is fast.

It’s not quite as fast as Samsung’s 9100 Pro drive I tested a few months ago, but it’s still crazy fast compared to even the best PCIe 4 drives on the market. With read speeds hitting 14.26GB/s and writes clocking in at 13.26GB/s, it’s hard to deny the power this drive offers.

I tested the Crucial T710 NVMe SSD with an active heatsink on my ASRock Taichi X670e motherboard, which is as close to an ideal setup as you can get. However, it still came in at around 14.5GB/s read and 13.8GB/s write, a bit below what this drive is rated for.

To put that into perspective, the Crucial T710 is faster than just about every drive on the market today, outside of the Samsung 9100 pro. Even then, the 1TB version of the Crucial T710 is rated for 14.9GB/s transfer speeds, which would put it ahead of the 9100 Pro.

NVMe Speed Might Not Matter for Gaming, but It Definitely Helps With Creative Tasks

There’s no doubt that the Crucial T710 is fast. That’s not up for debate. What is to be determined, however, is just how useful this drive would be in your workflow.

When I tested the Samsung 9100 Pro a few months ago, I ran extensive testing to see if a faster SSD actually resulted in real-world performance gains in gaming. The answer is no. A faster drive does not (yet) result in more FPS when gaming.

However, gaming isn’t the only reason to have a fast SSD. The Samsung 9100 Pro, and, of course, the Crucial T710, are both designed for a different type of workflow: creative tasks.

If you do video or photo editing, graphic design, 3D animation, or any other creative-type task that requires a computer, there’s a good chance you could benefit from a faster drive like the Crucial T710.

While I don’t do the heavy lifting of ultra-high-end video editing myself, I ran the AJA System Test to see exactly where this drive fits in compared to PCIe 4.0 drives. Using the UHD test with a 16GB file and ProRes 4444 codec (bypassing the drive’s cache in settings), I was able to achieve a speed of 1,883 frames per second write, and 1,612 frames per second read speeds on the Crucial T710.

Testing the Samsung 990 EVO Plus, a high-end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, I saw 801 frames per second write speeds, and 882 frames per second read speeds. The Crucial more than doubled the write performance, and is about 80% faster than the read performance.

This means if you’re doing a lot of 4K, 6K, 8K, or even 12K video work, your render time and overall performance could see a drastic increase by going with a PCIe 5 NVMe SSD like the Crucial T710. The test results speak for themselves.

However, if you’re just gaming or doing normal office work on your computer, you likely won’t benefit from the ultra-fast read and write speeds of a PCIe 5.0 SSD. I know my workflow won’t change much with the increased performance—yet.

I say yet because with Windows’ DirectStorage API, faster NVMe drives will start to be leveraged by games and graphics cards in the future. It’s not a widely-used API quite yet, but the groundwork is there for using ultra-fast NVMe drives as a help to graphics cards in the future.

Should you buy the Crucial T710 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD?

It’s tough to either recommend or not recommend the Crucial T710 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD. On the one hand, it’s one of the fastest SSDs on the market, and I’m always for having the bragging rights of “My SSD is faster than yours” when talking to friends about gaming PC specs.

On the other hand, it’s a pricey drive that doesn’t offer much real-world improvement unless you use it for a very specific set of tasks. For comparison, the 2TB Crucial P310 NVMe SSD, with read and write speeds up to 7.1GB/s, can be picked up for $125. That’s about $30 less than the 1TB T710, yet it has double the storage space.

At the end of the day, only you will know if this drive will actually benefit your setup. If you’re not a creative professional that needs to decrease render time, then I’d likely opt for a PCIe 4.0 SSD instead of the T710 purely on the basis of price and performance. However, if you are that creative professional, then the T710 is a fantastic drive that can drastically improve your workflow.