Crucial T500 2TB PCIe Gen4 SSD Review

While Crucial's flagship SSD line is the Gen 5 T700 series they haven't forgotten about Gen 4 drives as witnessed by the arrival of the next generation T500 drives. Part of Crucial's Pro line, the T500 has been designed for gaming, photo/video editing and high-workload applications and it is the fastest Gen 4 Crucial drive to date. It uses a combination of the latest Micron NAND and a Phison controller. At launch, the drive is available in three capacities; 500GB, 1TB and 2TB with a 4TB version coming next year (2024). As with the T700, the T500 is available in two versions, plain (all three capacities) and with an integrated heatsink (1TB & 2TB versions only).

At the heart of the T500 is a Phison PS5025-E25 controller. Details on this controller are pretty non-existent at the time of writing this review but what is known is that it has been designed to handle transfer speeds of up to 7,200MB/s, which is some 2,00MB/s faster than the current Phison E18 controller. Crucial has combined this controller in the T500 with Micron's own 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. The drive also uses Micron LPDDR4 DRAM for caching duties at a capacity of 1GB per 1TB of NAND flash.

Crucial rates the Sequential performance for the 2TB T500 as up to 7,400MB/s for reads and up to 7,000MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite hit those maximum figures with test results of 6,750MB/s for reads and 6,410MB/s for writes. Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 (default) benchmark we once again couldn't quite hit the official maximums with a best read figure of 7,259MB/s with writes at 6,866MB/s.

Random performance for the drive is quoted as up to 1,180,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,440,000 IOPS for writes. Using the Peak Performance Profile we saw a best-read result of 1,156,599 IOPS, shy of the official maximum but with a write figure of 1,458,281 IOPS we could confirm the official figure.

Crucial's T500 is a quick drive, indeed in some of our tests, it's the fastest Gen 4 consumer drive we've seen to date. But with high performance comes heat and PCIe Gen 4 drives are known for producing high temperatures when pushed hard. To see how hot the ‘plain' T500 got we ran a couple of benchmarks without any form of motherboard cooling in place. The drive reached 69° C under the ATTO benchmark but more worryingly it reached 73° C (reads) and 77° C (writes) when running the default CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark. Even though we didn't see any signs of throttling, running it without some form of heatsink is not something we would recommend. Sitting under the chunky passive heatsink that our test motherboard, Gigabyte's AORUS X670E Xtreme uses the hottest the drive got was 38° C during the CrystalDiskMark 8 Write test and the 0 fill Write test.

The T500 is supported by Crucial’s Storage Executive utility. It might not have the funky GUI of some of its competitors' utilities but what it lacks in looks it more than makes up in the support and tools that it offers.

Crucial has priced the 2TB version of the T500 at £165.81 (inc VAT).

Pros:

• Overall performance.
• Endurance.

Cons:

• Really needs a heatsink.
• Write speeds in some benchmark tests.

KitGuru Says: Crucial's latest Gen 4 drive is the company's fastest to date and in some of our testing it was the fastest Gen 4 drive we've seen so far. The non-heatsink version we were sent for review does need some form of motherboard cooling to help keep it cool.

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