Crucial T705 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD On Linux

In February was the announcement of the Crucial T705 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 SSD while reaching retail channels in March. This is a very speedy PCIe 5.0 solid-state drive that Crucial recently sent over for our Linux testing and review.

The Crucial T705 is the latest PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD around with read speeds rated up to 14,500 MB/s and writes up to 12,700 MB/s. This drive makes use of Micron 232-layer TLC NAND memory with the Phison E26 controller. The Micron B58R 232-layer 3D TLC NAND allows for the Crucial T705 to allow for better performance than last year's T700 SSD.

The 2TB Crucial T705 that was sent over as a review sample is rated for 1200TBW endurance and all of the Crucial drives remain backed by a five year warranty. The 2TB T705 has a list price of $400~440 USD, which is on the steep side compared to 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, but as of writing a number of Internet retailers are selling the Crucial T705 2TB currently for around $280~320 USD, but it's not clear if that deal is limited time or not.

In my testing of the Crucial T705 over the past two weeks it's been running well under Linux. No issues to speak of in terms of Linux compatibility or other issues encountered. The only desire really would be to see Crucial deliver firmware updates for their NVMe SSDs via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) / Fwupd. At this time Crucial is sadly not uploading firmware to LVFS but I certainly hope for a time where that changes to better support their Linux customers.

The Crucial T705 employs a passive heatsink, but you'll want to make sure you have sufficient airflow throughout your chassis. At first when testing in an open-air bench without any fan pointing towards the PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots I noticed some thermal throttling and lower performance. But when having a 80mm fan pointing towards there and then ultimately for the production testing within a 4U rackmount chassis where there is plenty of airflow, the Crucial T705 was performing well and without any obvious throttling and the NVMe drive temperature reporting not showing any problems. So just be on the lookout to ensure your system has sufficient airflow for this passive T705 heatsink and you should be in good shape.

I benchmarked the Crucial T705 along with other PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 SSDs that were on hand while using the Linux 6.7 stable kernel atop Ubuntu 23.10 Linux. All of the drives were freshly re-benchmarked on Linux 6.7 using a fresh EXT4 file-system on each drive.

For getting an idea of the Crucial T705 Linux performance I compared it to the freshly re-tested Corsair MP700 2TB and Corsair MP700 PRO 2TB PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs using PCIe 5.0 connectivity throughout via a Sabrenet PCIe 5.0 adapter in the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot of the motherboard. Unfortunately I didn't have a review sample of the prior Crucial T700 SSD for comparison purposes.