Corsair Force Series MP510 M.2 SSD Review - Introduction

Corsair Force MP510 M.2. NVMe SSD 

Corsair is back with some sweet NAND storage, this round an enthusiast class performing M.2. SSD, yes the MP510 is ready to be locked and loaded into your M2 slot, and this round you're going to see some staggering numbers that any fast PC could deserve. How does 3 GB/sec for reads and writes sound, anyone?

An SSD targeted towards gaming laptops and high-end PCs, it's thin and covered by a mixture of graphene foil. Available in capacities of 240, 480, 960 and even 1920 GB volume sizes. This SSD series offer peak read performance of up to 3,480 MB/s and a peak write speeds up to 3,000 MB/s. A gosh, that is so much faster way compared to what you can achieve with a SATA3 device. A small side note, performance will differ with different volume sizes, we'll put that into a table on the next page, but smaller versions use less NAND channels and thus have slower writing. That said, whatever size you choose, the perf will be great. The random performance rated up-to 610K random read IOPS and up to 570K write IOPS (!) Being M.2., you do need a modern motherboard with capable NVMe supported M.2 (PCI-Expresse Gen 3.0 x4 (and not x2) connected) interface, please do check out your motherboard manufacturer for that. But ever the past year or two all Intel and AMD chipset released in the mainstream to high-end class support it very well. M2 is interesting stuff, these smaller form factors storage units are evolving from being "just as fast" as a regular SSD towards double, tripling, heck... even quadrupling that performance. It comes in a different package, M.2. The M.2 interface is so much more capable as it can deal with way more bandwidth using PCI-Express lanes. As such, M.2 solutions are intended for enthusiast class motherboards. The series M.2 SSDs are a breathtaking series of storage technology as they offer enthusiast class performance yet remain reasonable in pricing depending on NAND type. 

The SSD is Corsair’s third consumer-ready Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) M.2 form factor SSD series. The SSDs have been fitted with Toshiba NAND (64-layer BiCS). The MP510 series M.2 product line is powered by the all-new Phison PS5012-E12 series NVMe controller. The SSD follows a smaller M.2 2280 (8cm) form factor so it will fit on most ATX motherboards capable of M.2 just fine.  Yeah, have a peek, and then let's head onwards into this review.

Corsair Force MP510 series M2 SSD with Phison PS5012-E12 controller and TLC written Toshiba NAND Flash