Corsair MP600 Pro XT PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe review - Specifications & Features

Specifications & Features

Corsair as stated is offering three versions of the MP600 Pro XT SSD; 1TB, 2TB and 4TB, unfortunately not an 8TB model. For endurance, our tested 2TB model has been rated at 1400 TBW. The series will be fitted with TLC written 3D NAND flash memory (vertically stacked over 96 layers). This allows the company to offer proper storage volumes. So instead of using Planar NAND, 3D NAND is used. 3D TLC NAND is physical vertical NAND cell stacking not to be confused with chip stacking in a multi-chip package. In 3D NAND, NAND layers, not chips, are stacked in a single IC. The good news is continued cost reduction, smaller die sizes and more capacity per NAND chip. Also, installed NAND toolsets in the wafer fabs can, for the most part, be reused, thereby extending the useful life of fab equipment. Unleashed by the PCIe 4.0 ready AMD B550/X570 chipset and Intel Rocket Lake-S / Z590, the SSD reaches up to an advertised 7000 MB/sec sequential read – fourteen times the performance of many SATA SSDs and seventy times faster than some hard disk drives. The performance stems from the hugely increased bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 (PCI-Express Generation 4), a feature that will be made available to customers for the first time as part of the AMD X570 chipset and 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen Desktop Processors. Easily fitting into a PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, the NVMe interface has been bumped upwards to the new 1.4 protocol and high-density TLC NAND combine with a Phison PS5018-E18 controller to enable a new level of single-drive SSD performance. Boasting staggering numbers.

Phison PS5018-E18 controller

Phison, based in Taiwan, is well-known for its flash NAND controllers, which have gained significant traction in recent years. In addition to being built on a Cortex-R5-based processor design, the PS5018-E18 controller is also constructed on TSMC's 12nm process technology. Furthermore, the controller includes three Cortex R5 cores running at 1GHz, as well as two Dual CoXProcessor 2.0 cores running at a lower clock speed that handle the host's requests as well as the SSDs' own NAND management algorithms. In addition, the controller supports the APST, ASPM, and the L1.2 standby power state for efficiency, as well as thermal throttling to guarantee that the system operates at a cool temperature. The MP600, like the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, does, however, have a low throttle temperature restriction, similar to the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. Thermal throttling is activated when the temperature rises above 68 degrees Fahrenheit. This approach dynamically reduces speed by approximately 50 MBps for every 1 degree Celsius above the temperature limit set by the manufacturer.  By upgrading this controller to NVMe revision 1.4, the transfer rate per channel has increased from 800MT/s to 1200MT/s. And when you do the arithmetic, you'll find that the maximum transfer speed for both sequential reads and writes is approximately 7GB/s. In addition, random read/write performance would be quoted at 1 million IOPS, and all of this would be accomplished with a projected peak energy usage of 3W just for the controller.