The battle for PCIe 5.0 supremacy is heating up.
Right, let me be clear here. Crucial’s T710 is without a doubt an all-out assault against the majesty that is Sandisk’s WDSN8100. Without question, that drive is the best PCIe 5.0 SSD out there today and has been for a few months now. Certainly as far as performance is concerned. But no crown can remain untouched forever, and Crucial is looking to ruffle a few electron-induced feathers in its attempt to pull out that red carpet from underneath Sandisk. This is the very best that Micron can muster right now, I’ve no doubt.
For those not in the know, Crucial is actually Micron’s consumer-oriented brand. Micron the massive american memory manufacturer. That gives it a distinct advantage over its competitors, as it can just use its own NAND flash in the production of its drives. Not only does that mean it can reserve its best tech for its OEM and off-the-shelf solutions, but there’s no middleman or NAND manufacturer taking a cut of the profits before the drive hits the shelves, and that might make all the difference here. I’ll explain why in a little bit.
As for the hardware side of things. At first glance, on the surface at least, there’s not a huge amount of disparity between the T710 and its SN8100 rival. Phison’s controller line has been ditched entirely, and like many others in the arena right now, Silicon Motion’s anointed prodigal son, the SM2508 PCIe 5.0 controller, has been picked instead. All in a bid to claim back Crucial’s crown as king of the SSD hill.
That controller, is of course, the same headline-grabbing unit that’s been littering all manner of drives of late. From Biwin’s X570 Pro to Acer’s Predator GM9000 as well, among many, many others. It comes complete with an eight-channel design operating at 3,600 MT/s brought about off the back of an Arm Cortex architecture built on TSMC’s 6 nm manufacturing process. With that comes a dedicated DRAM cache, utilizing LPDDR4 @ 4,266 MT/s. And it is not slow, not one bit, at least not when it’s paired with the right NAND.
