The prices of the fastest SSDs are finally crashing down to reality, and we love to see it. In this latest gaming SSD deal, you can grab a super-fast Crucial T705 PCIe 5.0 SSD for just $119.99, which is half its MSRP, saving you a massive $120. This isn’t just any SSD either, the 2TB version is the fastest drive we’ve ever tested, and the 1TB version on offer here can read at up to 13,600MB/s, which is an incredible speed for this price.
You can read all about how this drive performs in our full Crucial T705 review, where we said that its “read and write speeds set a new yardstick by which other drives will be measured.” At the time, we also criticized its high price, but that issue is more than addressed by this offer, which halves the price. The 1TB Crucial drive in this deal isn’t quite as quick as the 2TB drive we reviewed, with the latter able to read at up to 14,500MB/s, but it’s still massively quicker than any PCIe 4.0 SSD.
There’s a word of warning, though, which is that this drive runs hot when it’s running at full load, which can lead to throttling if it doesn’t have sufficient cooling. The drive on offer here doesn’t have a heatsink fitted, so you’ll need to make sure you attach the PCIe 5.0 SSD heatsink that comes with your motherboard – assuming it’s chunky enough – to keep it in check, or buy a third-party one.
You can also run this SSD in a PCIe 4.0 motherboard, of course, but it then won’t be able to run any faster than the 4x PCIe 4.0 interface, which tops out at 8GB/s, and will realistically limit your drive’s speed to 7,500MB/s at the most.
If you have a decent heatsink and a motherboard with a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, though, then what’s stopping you? Grab this super-fast SSD from this link here, and turbocharge your PC’s storage system. In our tests, the benefits of this drive in gaming are minimal (Forspoken loads in 2.87 seconds, rather than 3.05 seconds on the WD Black SN850X), but it’s incredibly fast as an all-purpose drive, scoring 5,935 in the PCMark 10 Quick System Drive benchmark, compared to 4,064 on the WD drive.
If this drive isn’t quite right for your needs, check out our guide to the best gaming SSD, where we take you through the top choices of drive for a range of systems and budgets. If you’ve never upgraded an SSD before, make sure you also read our guide on how to install an SSD, where we run you through the whole process step by step.