Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
So I had hopes that the M500 would have kicked the 960 series proverbial toosh, it's fast but just not that fast. But hey it is truly great to see Corsair pursue the M2 SSD arena with a product that that offers MLC NAND and a product that makes use of that blazing fast NVMe protocol. Remember, to fully utilize the performance that is offered for NVMe you need a supporting infrastructure meaning NVMe compatible X99 / Z97 / Z170 or Z270 motherboard, obviously preferably with PCI Express Gen. 3 x4 interface to fully utilize the bandwidth this product needs. NVMe based storage is one the most exciting technologies that we have been following develop closely over the past few years was obviously the development curve of NAND flash based storage technology. We moved from a 'blistering fast' 100 MB/sec towards numbers that are 20 to 30 fold of that. Next to that prices have been coming down, reliability has been top notch and ever so importantly volume sizes have moved upwards to a level where now 1TB SSDs are getting a norm slowly. The current new mainstream however is roughly 480 and 512GB which offers a nice balance in between performance and value. It truly is staggering to see where we are headed in terms of performance for NAND based flash storage units. For motherboards the industry will need to move to SATA4 rapidly with a serious increase in broad specced bandwidth to be able to keep up with M2 form factors and the NVMe protocol. The Corsair Force MP500 is a product that offers seriously fast performance in both reads and writes relative to what you pay for it. At just over 1 GB/s writes per seconds it is still twice sometimes even three times as fast as a mainstream SATA3 SSD, while topping 3 GB/s reads and thus more then quadrupling that number compared to a SATA3 SSD.
Performance
Overall these new Corsair Force MP500 storage units are fast, really fast even. Unfortunately they get trumped by the competition in absolute numbers, so while you are 4 maybe 5x as fast as a regular SSD, in the M2 NVMe line it is in the lower ranking (overall). That doesn't mean we can measure full 3000 MB/sec speeds or 2400 MB/s writes, it's just that the application software adn workload needs to match a certain optimal state to reproduce these numbers. IOPS performance is very good, easily close to 200K. This SSD writes and reads serious amounts of tiny files in a very fast fashion. We stated it before though, IOPS is not something you as a consumer should worry about too much unless you are doing a lot of database related work or create similar workloads on your PC, but this SSD certainly ranks high within this aspect. Trace testing - we feel that one of the best tests in our entire benchmark suite is PCMark Vantage 64-bit. This is a trace test and can emulate what you guys do on your PC but then multiplied by a factor of 100, this test puts more focus on read performance opposed to writing though. The outcome of the results with the Corsair Force MP500 is good but but not exceptional for an M2 NVMe product. Sustained read / write performance, again excellent and as advertised. Read performance in particular leads and is top ranking. Overall the series is impressive. Zoom in at both IOPS and trace performance and you'll notice that the SSD can manage serious workloads without breaking so much as a drop of sweat. So whether you write lots of small files, copy big MKV movies or do it all together, the Corsair Force MP500 remains a top dog on all fronts.
Overall NAND Storage Usage
Any SSD is enjoyable, very much so. If you put a drive like this into your compatible PC, you'll have no idea what is about to hit you. We very much enjoy the grand sustained performance of this SSD series; if you copy a vast amount of compressed data, then the Corsair MP500 will perform very fast in performance. Make no mistake, replacing a HDD with an SSD in your PC eliminates the random access lag of the HDD head, it is no longer mechanical. That combined with the performance SATA3 / M.2 / mSATA offers these days is simply a massive difference and probably the best upgrade you can make for your computer anno 2017.
Pricing & Warranty
Corsair is able to keep the prices very competitive, but obviously a unit this fast is more expensive opposed to a regular SATA3 SSD. There are street prices in the initial launch wave.
- Corsair Force MP500 120GB M.2 (PCI-e 3.0 x4) @ 3.000/2.400MB/s - 108 EURO
- Corsair Force MP500 240GB M.2 (PCI-e 3.0 x4) @ 3.000/2.400MB/s - 168 EURO
- Corsair Force MP500 480GB M.2 (PCI-e 3.0 x4) @ 3.000/2.400MB/s - 310 EURO
Concluding
We love anything NVMe these days. You'll be amazed how fast you get used towards 1, 2 even 3 GB/sec read speeds. The numbers that these NVMe M2 units produce are obviously staggering and as such impressive. Now keep in mind, going from a HDD towards an SSD is making a huge difference. Going from a fast SATA3 SSD towards NVMe M2 again is a faster step, but admittedly a far less less to notice one, as a regular SSD is already loading your data in a split second. Access times with HDDs always have been the biggest bottleneck, that mechanical head positioning itself on the platters was eliminated. With the introduction of SSD that massive latency issue was completely killed off, and that's where 90% of the performance benefit was found. So the big question remains how fast do these SSDs really need to be ? It is a discussion that will be interesting to see in the coming years. Honestly I think the trend will be NVMe with more capacity, 99.999% reliability and endurance (TB Written) as main factors being decisive. So in that respect, the Corsair Force MP500 series is impressive seen from a SATA3 SSD. You will (give or take) quadruple your read performance over that regular SATA3 SSD. For writes that is double to triple the performance of today's SATA3 solutions. Among the M2 NVMe competition however this is a more difficult to position product price and perf wise. We cannot ignore one fact though, Samsung dominates the NVMe space, there's just no doubt about it and they are just tough to beat with their tremendous R&D and budgets tied to that.
Remember, there are requirements for proper M.2 usage though. You do need to use the right combination of OS/UEFI motherboard and CPU, we do recommend X79/X99 and Z87/Z97/Z170 or newer (Z270) gear here. Check with your motherboard manufacturers if the board can support M.2 with four PCI-Express lanes (Gen 3.0) and NVMe as I assume you do want maximum performance and compatibility? With the Force MP500 series you receive a three year carry-in warranty, we do feel that is a little shy as for this price range and MLC NAND 5 years (much like the competition) is the way to go. Whatever you are planning with this storage unit, you are good to go from gaming, overall net pc usage (albeit overkill) to video transcoding and editing and content creation, this is by far one of the fastest SSD series available for I/O intensive workloads, consumer grade that is. Coming from an HDD or SATA3 SSD overall this Force MP500 series M2 SSD unit will lift your storage performance to new extraordinary levels. Compared to the M2 NVMe direct competition like OCZ, Samsung, Toshiba the Force MP500 series however still has a few hurdles to tackle as this product is rankling lower in performance within this specific segment. Knowing Corsair we assume that with future firmware releases the gap hopefully will be closed. In the end this remains to be a serious fast M2 SSD, pricing however could and likely should be a notch lower. At least under the Samsung 960 PRO and maybe even EVO level. However, if your motherboard supports it and if you are in the market for something truly fast then hey the MP500 comes recommended, more even so if you want something different then Samsung for a change or just to match up everything inside your PC with the Corsair brand for uniformity.
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