Corsair MP600 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD review - Introduction

Corsair MP600 PCIe 4.0 NVMe Solid-State Drive
High-end M.2. Class SSD performance

It's time to review some next-level M.2. NVMe shizzle, yes we review the Corsair MP600 PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD. Of course it is an SSD you can seat into any PCIe 3.0 compatible PC, however, if you place it into a Ryzen 3000 / X570 based PC, some magic happens as you are running 4000 MB/s numbers and higher, thanks to the new PCIe 4.0 interface and a little TLC from Phison, well Toshiba strictly speaking. The past few weeks has seen a lot of PCIe Gen 4.0 related announcements. Of course, the dazzling numbers from SSDs at that speed do impress. Corsair released  the MP600 at roughly 25 Cents per GB and you can purchase it in a 1TB and 2TB model, the MP600 units will be available at €249,- and €449,- respectively. 

The specs are great the numbers eye-soaring, but will this unit deliver what it claims? As filling up the bus with 4 maybe even 5 GB/s speeds, is a difficult challenge. The MP600 comes in an M.2 package. Using the PCIe lanes interface it is so much more capable as it can deal with way more bandwidth using PCI-Express lanes Gen 4.0. As such, M.2 solutions are intended for high-end and enthusiast class motherboards and similar positioned laptops.

• Max Sequential Read - Up to 4950 MBps
• Max Sequential Write - Up to 4250 MBps
• 4KB Random Read - Up to 680K IOPS (QD32)
• 4KB Random Write - Up to 600K IOPS (QD32)
• Endurance (TBW) up to 3600 TBW (2TB model)

While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing at as fast a pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking. You get between 450 MB/s to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 which is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Now in the year 2018 by combining advanced NAND Flash controller with PCIe Gen 3(8Gb/s) x 4, NvMe 1.3 interface and 3D NAND Flash, PCIe M.2 delivers sequential read speed up to 3200MB/s and sequential write speed up to 1500MB/s. It is now 2019, and PCIe Gen 4 NvMe 1.3 is here, offering closer to 5 GB/s performance - ranges and that is factor 10 over the SATA3 SSD.

A couple of years ago a 128 GB SSD was hot stuff, then slowly we moved to 256 GB, last year 512 GB for an SSD in a PC was the norm, this upcoming years we'll transition slowly to roughly TB SSDs as the norm. With the market being so huge, fierce and competitive, it brought us to where we are today... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. We'll inspect the product PCB and components later on in the review in detail. This unit uses vertically stacked NAND (also referred to as 3D NAND) and are now available multiple capacities. With a low power design, this drive will be among the mainstream to fastest SSDs we have ever tested.

The SSD is a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe 1.3) M.2 form factor SSD, it has been fitted with new Vertically stacked NAND (64-layer BiCS)  TLC. The performance numbers of a proper SATA3 SSD offers these days are simply excellent, but with the more niche NVMe SSDs you can easily quadruple performance, which offers serious numbers. The unit follows a smaller M.2 2280 form factor (8cm) so it will fit on most ATX motherboards capable of M.2 just fine. Anyway, wanna see how fast the MP600 really is? Next page and onwards into the review then.