Crucial T705 2TB SSD Review

The T705 Heatsink comes in a decent quality box with a good clear image of the drive on the front. To the right of this image is a longish sticker that displays the capacity of the drive, the interface, maximum Sequential read speed and a logo stating the 5-year warranty. There's also mention of the one-month complimentary Adobe Creative Cloud personal All Apps plan (while supplies last). The rear of the box is home to some multi-lingual notes about the drive's speed, backward compatibility and the fact that it has a factory-fitted heatsink.

Under the two-part heat sink, the 2TB T705 is built on a dual-sided M.2 2280 format. Crucial's design for the passive heatsink for the T705 isn't as massive as some we've seen, only adding around 19mm to the height and 39g to the weight of the drive. It's the same heatsink as the T700 uses, constructed from aluminium and nickel-plated copper but unlike the one used in the T700, it doesn't use screws to hold the heatsink and cradle together but instead seems to rely on the thermal paste being used which going by the way that its really difficult to separate the heatsink components must have some sort of superglue mixed in with it. It's so well bonded that we gave up trying to prise the heatsink off in case it caused damage to the PCB.

One side of the PCB holds the Phison PS5026-E26 8-channel controller, two Micron 232-layer (B58R) 3D TLC NAND packages and a 2GB LPDDR4 DRAM IC. The two remaining NAND packages are to be found on the other side of the PCB.

Phison's PS5026-E26 is built on a 12nm process, it uses dual Arm Cortex-R5 cores that work together with Phison’s CoXProcessor 2.0 specialised accelerators. It supports up to 32TB of TLC or QLC NAND flash memory with data transfer speeds of up to 2,400MT/s. The previous T700 drive had the controller and memory running at 2,000MT/s but for the T705 both controller and memory are running at full whack. The controller supports the company's 5th Generation LDPC ECC engine and also provides TCG OPAL 2.0 support which Crucial has enabled on the T705.

Crucial’s Storage Executive is a pretty comprehensive SSD toolkit. With it, you can check the drive’s S.M.A.R.T data, update the firmware, see how the drive’s capacity is being used, monitor the drive’s operating temperature and overall health as well as adjust the Over Provisioning. There are a few more options as well that aren't supported by this particular drive.

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