PCIe Gen5 Drives are Here! Are they Worth It?? - Crucial T700 PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD

Crucial just sent us their new T700 SSD and thanks to the power of PCIe Gen 5 this very well maybe the fastest NVMe SSD on the planet. So how fast does it go? And should you consider one for your next build?

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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
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0:00 I was paid to write this intro
1:16 What's New!
3:28 T700 vs 990 Pro CrystalDiskMark
4:52 How SSDs work
5:45 More Testing
8:12 The Numbers on the Box Lie
10:26 The Problem with Gen 5
10:55 The Solution with Gen 5
13:10 Raid 0 is dumb

[KaminKevCrew]

I think it would be great if you guys would color code your graphs depending on if higher or lower is better - I feel like that would make them much easier to read at a glance.

[gawrbage]

6:30 The reason why the Gen 5 drive won in the first round but lost in the second when opening PCMark 10 is because after opening PCMark 10 once, PCMark 10 is saved into the RAM as cache. So in the second run, the drives were not used, instead Windows loaded PCMark 10 from the cache instead of the drive, which is why the Gen 5 drive seemed slower in the 2nd round.

[TANred]

Linus' explanation of stacks using plane seats is so easy to understand, and interactive, wish he could do some more of those explanation sections in the Vids.

[ZeroUm_]

I loved the final bit about PCI 5.0, it's the most important message of the video. Desktop is starting to get the same PCI lane benefits of server-class platforms of a few generations ago, in a much more slim package. PCI 6.0 might be the tipping point of too much bandwidth, where we come out with novel ways of using it all.

[diegocajiao]

I really liked the explanation as well as the animation for the plane passengers to explain how ssds function. I think explanations that anyone can understand help to get a lot more people into tech when it doesn't seem so intimidating. Great video!

[danmacdonald]

SSD storage is interesting. A few years back I worked in a lab and we had a very niche use case where we needed maximum sustained throughput. This was when the 970pro was the top of the line.

We had a high speed camera setup that collected data from an experiment. It was not for particularly insane fps, but high FPS for rather insane lengths of time to capture an entire run. We'd saturate PCIe 3 for several minutes. Basically filling an entire 1TB drive per experiment run, one camera per drive and up to three cameras.

At the time, the pro series used actual MLC, not TLC they now advertise as "3 bit mlc". This meant that they didn't have the cache overflow performance hit and could happily fill at full speed.

Once to save a buck, one of my colleague's got some EVOs. They did not understand the cache behaviour and just saw that the drives had the same performance specs since w didn't need longevity. Needless to say they did not work. After a few seconds of video the collected fps would tank as in the plot in this review.

Seeing that chart reminds me why I remain bitter about the way drives are marketed to this day 😂.

[Jjrage]

Another possible test you could do for drives is verifying files of a game. I feel like that's something people actually do semi-regularly, and it would be good to know if there's an actual real world difference there. I imagine it would just be the same as sequential read/write but you never know!

[sourceeee]

It's insane just how fast and future proof our hardware is, that I'm still using my almost 5 year old AM4 PCIE gen 3 mobo with a gen 4 SSD, which really goes to show just how little bandwidth a lot of everyday tasks require. minus maybe video editing or moving large files inbetween storage or ram, I've never personally needed anything faster lol

[Ghan]

I'm glad you included some discussion about the PCIe lanes because this does seem to be a point of stagnation. We haven't seen much development on the lanes in years other than upgrades to the PCIe generation. Though when it comes to drive performance, I would have loved to see you dust off a PCIe 3.0 Optane drive and see how its random performance compares. I suspect it would still be able to keep up with the Gen 5 drive in some tests.

[nhand]

That airplane seat analogy is really good. Very accurate description of the page read/flash/write cycle. Whoever in the writing team came up with that should take home extra office supplies this week.

[hecticb]

I think you made a strong point of how useful the new per-lane efficiencies of PCIe Gen5 are, technology and cost-wise.
What you didn’t address is what are the next steps (if any) that the industry might be considering for making a leap in random read/write speeds and/or cache dimensioning.
Definitely a good subject for a follow up video. See what’s out there.
How to resolve the baseline problem of random read/write speeds not improving at all.

[PHOBIAxx]

I feel like 3gen drives will be good enough for me for at least a decade and they can easily be passively cooled.

[jomeyqmalone]

I appreciate Buildzoid's characterization of these developments as being really exciting for "file transfer enthusiasts". And that snark is coming from someone who devotes large amounts of time to making spec numbers slightly higher.

[DrathVader]

My first attempt at messing with ram disks a couple of years ago wasn't as fast as this. Crazy how far mass storage has come

[Kevin-uhkm]

Pro tip, use a software like primocache that will use an allocated amount of ram as a ram disk to cache all your SSD's/HDD data for a few minutes while programs read and write to that data randomly. Once all the data is done being utilized in either read or write applications it will either sit there on the ram ready to be accessed again or be written to the disk sequentially! Automatically or manually.

[CarbonPanther]

Really goes to show that Intel Optane was already the pinnacle of Nvme drives... It's so unfortunate that they are no longer actively developing Optane drives.
We already had the random Reads/Writes with Optane as well as insanely low latency all noticeable in everyday use like booting Windows or starting programs.
It's a shame really that it never had a chance to become cheap and adopted by the market.

[rmaster]

I love how this video went into SO MUCH INFO!!! it wasn't just a "this is how it performs. The end" it really went into details. Thanks!

[CantTreadOnMe]

Id love to see the difference between 970 evo plus gen 3 vs the gen 5. Maybe we could see a more significant difference or not and really see if its worthwhile. Cuz if 2 generations show almost no noticeable difference in real time real world use than we could understand for sure if this is something to consider. Id bet most people have a gen 3 over a gen 4 as well.

[Scious]

Would love to see some more real world/game comparisons, but with more setups like hdd vs sata ssd vs gen 3/4/5 nvme

[SapphicShiro]

This video once again reminds me of how sad I am that Intel discontinued its 3DXP SSDs. They were prohibitively expensive, but the technology addressed all of NAND's shortcomings in a way that genuinely had me excited for the for the future of storage innovation.