Before starting the second stage of the tests, we needed to fill the drive over 50%; during this time, we also monitored transfer rate to check how the caching system does perform. Before writing continuously to the drive, we noted a very good temperature reported by the sensors, about 41 degrees Celsius; the room ambient where the test machine was located measured 26.5 degrees Celsius:

The write workload started at optimal speeds:

We noted a small speed drop to about 3.2GB/s after having written about 205GB of data:

During this time, the temperature was still in very safe margins, at about 50 degrees Celsius:

A sharp speed drop was observed after having written about 695GB of data, which is quite impressive for a mainstream drive! What is not so impressive is the speed the T500 runs with the pSLC caching fully filled; while the initial drop was quite big in terms of performance, the drive quickly recovered but the speed remained under HDD levels, between 50MB/s and 125MB/s:

The maximum temperature we have recorded while testing the drive was 66 degrees Celsius, so we cannot talk about throttling, the integrated cooling system doing an excellent job: