Should you use PCie Gen 5 NVMe as a boot drive? Will Windows work?

In this video I'm investigating where it's a good idea to use PCIe gen 5 NVME SSDs as you boot drive. In other words, should you put Windows on these drives?

A while back I got my hands on the Crucial T700. A drive that runs at ridiculous speeds (upto 12,000MB/s) and the data for that drive showed that if you put too much load on it then it can lead to problems if it overheats because the drive will suffer from thermal throttling. This isn't unique to these drives of course, but if it gets hot beyond that then it will simply stop functioning. SO I was wondering, if you had Windows on that drive and were running it under heavy load, would your PC simply turn off?

But then I also had this Corsair 2000D tiny ITX case and wondered what would happen in a case that would naturally get hot. So I setup a system with the Firecuda and then benchmarked it to get it nice and toasty and watched what happened. This video covers the results of that experiment.

Specs of this Corsair 2000D Airflow build (note this includes affiliate links that earn me a commission at no extra cost to you)

Please note links listed here include affiliate links which may earn me a commission. Find out more below.*

If you need m2 screws for your motherboard you can get them from Amazon here:

Disclosure: Shopping links within the description of this video generate a commission at no extra cost to you. These are added for your convenience but other retailers are available. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Products:
Products featured may also have been sent for free for review/testing purposes. Often these have to be returned by me, but not always. I endeavour to avoid bias in my videos wherever possible and try to give honest, subjective opinions. Unless otherwise stated, the videos are not sponsored financially.

Related videos on NVMes that you should watch:

🏆Big thanks to my super awesome YouTube members:
SirSpawnsALot, Meatykeyboard, Rawrr483, Aaron Yarden, Space Cannons, Riggs79, Mike S, Jay Shank 007, Jason Morgan, Starastin, Charles Latrom, McFarty, Chief Hao, Kraken Tortoise, Chris Thompson, Dazed Bengone and Megan Schafer.

Read this far? You're awesome. Smash those sub and like buttons!

📌 Support the channel:

[Nicc]

I decided to go with gen 4 for my AM5 build. Works great :) 7800x3d with 7900 xtx and 32gb ram, 2 tb storage.

[dennisreese]

Very timely in my case with a new build in process. Many thanks. You have been most helpful for an old newbie!

[jpchave]

Clearly Win 11 24H2 works with a Crucial T700 which is a Gen 5 SSD but take I own a 1 To Crucial T700 with heatsink and the performance is not at the expected level described in the technical documentation. I use the SSD as a "system SSD" with Win 11 24H2 and numerous softwares and games are installed. During light works the SSD temperature is contained between 60 an 65°c, once the load is higher the temperature increases up to 82°. The transfer speeds given in the technical documentation for sequential reading is 12400 Mb/s and the for sequential writting is 11800 Mb/s. My experience is that when the temperature is around 60° the speeds are close to the documentation values, during heavy load the temperature raise up to 82°c and the speeds are lower than 5 Mb/s (divided by 2.5). This look like to a temperature control loop based on the Clearly the T700 SSD does not meet the announced values, my advice is to save money and choose another SSD, Gen 4 for exemple. Having this SSD I have to manage it and I am going to buy an active heathsink. I hope that I will be able to maintain the temeperature lower than

[tradcatpat]

I've got an ROG STRIX Z790-I GAMING WIFI with a Crucial T700 1Gb NVME that never goes beyond the mid-50's Celsius. Previously had it in an Aorus Z790 Master and it never broke 50 Celsius in that board. If you're thinking of using a Gen 5 NVME in your motherboard, go for it, the speeds (11, 700 Read/9, 600 Write) are just FUN!

[anth]

Missed an important point. What was the ambient temperature of the room? Someone in a warmer room could run into problems.

[DizConnected]

I KNOW it's a complete waste of money, but I just bought a Crucial New T705 4TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe M.2 SSD - Up to 14, 100 MB/s. I'll try the heatsink cover that came with it the Motherboard, but I expect I will have to buy a much beefier M.2 heatsink to keep it under 81C where it starts throttling. On another note, I LOVE ITX builds and this is the 1st time I've seen this Corsair case and really like it!

[Julie]

Correction: At 4:44, TPP says "the max temp is 75 C, which is 10 degrees less than the max that would cause a problem"

NOTE: 85 degrees C is the max NON-OPERATING temperature, and the max operating temperature (as shown at 3:47) is 70 degrees C.
So at 75 C, it is running 5 degrees hotter than the specified operating temperature range

[blazedyoda]

Hello there I just wanted to offer my two cents on some of the concerns I have in this video, I want to start by saying this is the first video I’ve seen of yours and I have subscribed to your channel. This is by no means intended as hate or disrespect, more just wanting to give some feedback and help improve the channel.

1. I noticed while you used a lot of synthetic loads to put pressure on the drive there was no real world sustained use case pushing this drive and truly seeing how it performs in the short-medium term at least. Might I suggest running this drive as the main windows drive as you work on it to edit the videos, while downloading a game and uploading a YouTube video? Just truly push this drive and find out it’s limit both architecturally and thermally.

2. I noticed you used Fortnite and unigine heaven in this video. Fortnite is not a good use case to show for gaming as it runs on practically all systems (including smartphones) with no real issues whatsoever for drives. I think trying out games that could have poor optimisation on pc such as any of the Sony titles or maybe games that sony showed off with their own nvme drive like ratchet and clank rift apart this would’ve been a better real world choice. I think using unigine heaven was a bad move, you could’ve used unigine superposition instead it’s also free and a far better option to test hardware like this and push your pc to its limits therefore generating a lot of heat increasing the ambient temps inside the case. I’m not sold on the fact heaven did this sufficiently.

In conclusion I love your voice, Narrative and the format of the videos, it’s always nice to see a fellow Brit makes videos with tech and talk about this stuff I feel YouTube is just absolutely flooded with Americans and Canadians whom opinions on hardware don’t always match up what we feel in Europe due to the prices and availability differences of hardware of the two continents. I hope you take on board some of my criticisms and that it makes the channel better. Great video and I wish you luck in the future!

[Linkolnverse]

Built in fan on the motherboards nvme port? OH hell yes.

[patrickfrensdorff]

why buy a seagate? if a brand has the most broken stuff in hardware it is seagate...

[Platinumdose]

why did you try ripping the thermal pad off? that's not reccommaneded!!!

[wolfwilkopter]

I'm very happy with my 2TB Samsung 990Pro as OS drive, powering my 5800X3D System.
It sits comfortably under a Acidalie VB01 in Black and runs more than well.
No need for hot and expensive Gen5, wouldnt make any meaningful difference.
JFYI: Samsung finally has brought the 4TB Model to the market.

[AuFguy]

Running Win 11 Pro on Crucial T700 2TB, been pretty stable thus far.

[deanpartridge]

Hi iv just bought a strix b650e-e board it has to gen 5 slots and 2 gen 4 slots. Problem is the botton gen 5 slot shares lanes with gpu. Question is shall i put my os on gen 5 top slot snd use a gen 4 slot for my games. Please help lol

[MandM]

Hi, ok : Could you show the temperature difference between the original Lian Li Lancool 3 and SL-INF 140 case fans,
and between SL-INF 140 and Lian Li SL120 INF in Aio and case? :)

[angelolima]

How about for windows 10 on an Dell latitude i7270 using an enclosure or directly in the laptop

[michalsavatar]

Great analysis. So if you were to choose, would you put the boot drive on a gen 4 or gen 5 M.2? And also, which ever one you recommend, would you also recommend putting ONLY the Windows boot files on that M.2 and nothing else?

[eury]

You probably should not set the Gen5 as the boot drive because you may want to upgrade that later on as speeds increase. This way you won't need to waste time cloning the boot drive

[dystopia-usa]

Unnecessary, unless you are a professional benchmarking e-athlete.

[TheDVRS]

If you add a heatsink should you remove the sticker ?