Corsair MP600 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The MP600 series leaves a very mixed impression. In one hand more impressive peak performance, mostly sustained, and in the other, it offers fairly normal NVMe high-end performance. I've been thinking about what is happening and can only conclude that the controller + TLC NAND simply is running out of oomph under strained and specific workloads. Much like when you write many gigs continuously and see the TLC write hole. Our workloads put a lot of strain on the SSD and at one point you hit a bottleneck, TLC is a weak spot for super fast and many writes. So the trace tests you have seen from the PCMark 8 suite for example completely load and stress up the SSD, and it is here where the MP600 has a harder time to deliver in the performance bracket where it needs to be. And I do deem the PCMark 8 trace tests to be the best benchmark series in our test suite. 

Now we also need to place it all in a relative matter, this SSD does reach 4.5 GB/sec given the right workload and Crystaldiskmark indeed hits 5 GB/s. Copying many many gigabytes of movies and ISOs for example, well this SSD laughs at it, and while copying I actually laughed a bit nervously. I mean our 110 GB test file I had to copy towards this SSD from a Gigabit NAS, that took 18 minutes. Then copying the same file from an 870 EVO Plus towards the MP600 ... far less than a minute, bat-poop crazy.

So the results are a bit all over the place really, but it's also priced fairly competitive. I mean this super fast performing M.2. unit costs ~25 cents per GB in retail right now. The unit reveals speeds at 2GB/ to 4.5 GB/s reads sometimes, in writes things are varying more. IOPS performance is great as well, but it does need massive queues and preferably threads for it to be able to show.

Concluding

So yes, I am battling the conclusion of the MP600. It shatters records given the right conditions, but on in other workloads, you are down to high-end class TLC NVMe performance. And there is an abundance of choice available these days. The fact that in roughly 50% of the tests a 970 EVO can outperform this unit is an issue. Then again, we doubt you'd ever notice the perf differences. What this product really does is pioneering, it is the first PCIe Gen 4.0 compatible NVMe 1.3 compatible SSD. And at 25 cents per GB and for this 2TB a 3600 TBW value, heck .. it's pretty nice to own alright. The cost of ownership does require a Ryzen series 3000 and X570 motherboard though, but that's AMD for you as they wanted to offer you a technology advantage over team blue. Now I am giving the Mp600 a recommended award for price level and sheer peak performance. We do hope to see perhaps a firmware update that will boost performance a bit more. If not, then we're looking at a TLC / controller bottleneck. But that bottleneck is still multiple times faster than a SATA3 SSD. If you want to brag about your PCIe 4.0 perf, then this might just be what you've been looking for. For the majority of users, I do tend to say that on a proper SATA3 SSD or PCIe Gen 3.0 storage unit, you'll be fine as well.

I like to close with this line, while top sequential and sustained benchmark figures are incredibly fun to look at and nearly eye-popping with this SSD, it's the overall real-world performance that I care about. And in that respect, we expected to see a bit more perf overall in our trace tests and that is the honest truth. Perhaps a firmware tweak will lift things up a bit. It still is amazing to see where prices and performance are now compared to what you got in performance and money a few years ago. And hey, 3600 TBW and a 5-year warranty. Not bad, not bad at all.

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