Circling back to the E26.
Sadly, this heat and safety reduction in available power does mean that while this 2+3 processor combination that has worked extremely well for Phison in the past… it is not entirely up the task of handling PCIe 5.0 demands. After all, this controller is ‘only’ rated by Phison to handle up to 14GB/s which leaves a noticeable chunk of theoretical performance on the cutting room floor. More importantly it is less than what this new RG 3.0 NAND can do. Remember this NAND is rated for 2GB/s per 232-layer deck and with eight of them being being actively read or written too at a given time (the E26 is a 8 channel design after all) that is a theoretical 16GB/s of horsepower on tap… or more than enough to saturate an PCIe 5.0 x4 bus. Thus, the reduction in power available to the controller is the bottleneck in the T700 – just as it will be in all E26 based SSDs. No wonder Micron has opted to not release the ‘full speed’ 2.4GB/s version of this NAND… yet. When controllers capable of handling 2,400MT/s NAND become available we are sure Micron will not only release that version of this NAND on to the market… but make a T-800… or T-1000 to showcase it properly.
On the plus side this ‘reduction’ in performance does mean backwards compatibility with PCIe 4.0 based systems should result in little degradation of real-world performance. Assuming the M.2 port can handle 12+ watts of power that is. After all, many circa PCIe 4.0 motherboards expected the M.2 drive to pull at most 9 watts and never even considered a 12 watt’er when designing said port’s power delivery.
On the truly positive side, this eight channel NVMe controller is the fastest NVMe controller available today. So, make no mistake. This is a very, very potent controller. One that packs in a lot of bleeding edge technology. Technology that not only makes the SSD faster, but also more reliable. For example, unlike previous controllers which were NVMe 1.x compliant, the E26 is NVMe 2.0 compliant – which means more efficient commands, greater performance (via NVMe-ZNS and a more efficient base structure) and less wasted write cycles on internal house cleaning (via NVMe-KV, NVMe-EGM, etc.).
Beyond being NVMe 2.0 complaint it means smarter pseudo-SLC caching (~11 percent of free capacity), numerous firmware improvements (the controller wastes fewer cycles thanks to cleaner, more efficient code), and a new 5th generation LDPCC engine. The latter of which is faster and smarter at handling ECC errors than the already impressive 4th gen was. So much so that ‘perfect storms’ are even less likely to occur and highly unlikely to be noticed by the end user… especially when dealing with a 2TB drive that boasts ‘up to’ a ~220GB pseudo-SLC cache buffer and a SSD that has native (ie exhausted SLC buffer) write performance of basically 3.6GB/s (or nearly twice the speed of the last generation PCIe 4.0 Phison based drives).
Speaking of performance this controller is rated for 1.5M IOPS read and write… which is basically 50 percent higher than what the last gen / PCIe 4.0 Phison controlelrs were rated for. Taken as a whole Crucial did make the best decision possible in opting for this controller over the competition.
Moving on. Backstopping this potent controller is four Gigabytes worth of LPDDR4 RAM. Specifically, the T700 2TB makes use of a single Micron D8CJ RAM IC. Using Micron’s parts decoder that translates to a MT53E1G32D2FW-046 WT:B RAM IC. Which is Micron naming for an 4GB/32Gbit LPDDR4-4266 IC. There are some concerns over whether or not the Phison E26 can make use of anything faster than DDR4-3200 but worst-case scenario this RAM IC is running at tighter timings than what is typically paired with the E26. Either way, this is a big and fast RAM cache buffer. Just as one would expect on a flagship premium NVMe SSD.
As you can see Crucial really did not spare any expense in the design or building of their new flagship Pro T700 series. Just as one would expect from a company with such a sterling reputation for customer commitment. Color us impressed.
