Corsair is finally catching up and possibly even made a better SSD than Samsung's 970. Great news, Samsung needs the competition. This new Phison controller also seems very promising! I'm a bit of a Corsair fan (I own the 460X, HD120's, ML120's, Dominator Special Edition Chrome DDR4 and HX850i) so I'm excited they're finally relevant in the SSD market as well. I look forward to a future where I can control everything through iCue rather than needing 3 different applications.

We all know that Samsungs and Microns dominate the NVMe space, so perhaps give some others a chance as well to battle the big guns

I've said this before on your Corsair SSD reviews, but this should never be an argument as a reviewer. You should review performance and how good of a buy it is for a consumer. You shouldn't say "yeah they're the underdog so you should consider them". Even when they weren't a great choice I still saw this argument in the reviews. That way you're telling your readers to buy a lesser product just because it's from an underdog brand.

I'd like to see the 480GB version performance if you can get a drive Hilbert. Thanks for the review, the only thing I find puzzling is the high TBW endurance they are claiming. They say 800TBW for the 480GB but other manufacturers are claiming 200 for that same 64 TLC Toshiba NAND. How can we sure they are not just making this up?

Unilythe:

Corsair is finally catching up and possibly even made a better SSD than Samsung's 970. Great news, Samsung needs the competition. This new Phison controller also seems very promising! I'm a bit of a Corsair fan (I own the 460X, HD120's, ML120's, Dominator Special Edition Chrome DDR4 and HX850i) so I'm excited they're finally relevant in the SSD market as well. I look forward to a future where I can control everything through iCue rather than needing 3 different applications. I've said this before on your Corsair SSD reviews, but this should never be an argument as a reviewer. You should review performance and how good of a buy it is for a consumer. You shouldn't say "yeah they're the underdog so you should consider them". Even when they weren't a great choice I still saw this argument in the reviews. That way you're telling your readers to buy a lesser product just because it's from an underdog brand.

Checked few more reviews and it looks like still 970 EVO is still better (maybe except short burst workload and wear). It still have only small cache compared to 960 EVO which after ~30GB drop write speed

fantastic. i'm very curious about the performance of the Phison controller vs. others, especially HP's new M.2 rocking the Toshiba memory with their own controller.

Andy Watson:

I'd like to see the 480GB version performance if you can get a drive Hilbert. Thanks for the review, the only thing I find puzzling is the high TBW endurance they are claiming. They say 800TBW for the 480GB but other manufacturers are claiming 200 for that same 64 TLC Toshiba NAND. How can we sure they are not just making this up?

1) Corsair's reputation and service record 2) the memory is probably binned 3) the other companies are too cheap to give a proper warranty / this is an inducement to buy.

The winner in these tests, and overall best performance/price ratio goes to the 480gb SX8200 from ADATA, check the price and you'll see what i mean 😉

Is there any advantage of these NVMe drives over a SATA3 SSD? It seems that in all read world tests shown in this article that they perform almost within margin of error of SATA3 SSD's, I'm talking game load time, PC start up time, application load time, even things like Photoshop. The only thing that really stands out as a real world winner for NVMe vs SATA3 SSD is large file copy, that 38 GB compressed MKV file copy test, and that's not something that I nor almost anyone does on any regular basis. NVMe also seems more susceptible to heat issues & thermal throttling, which if it happens drops performance to less than SATA3 SSD (I think). To me it seems like the only argument to get an NVMe drive is if you've run out of space for SATA3 SSD's in your PC and you want to use up that empty NVMe slot, but even then the drives are more expensive than SATA3. Is there really any real world benefit of NVMe? (I've got an empty NVMe slot on my motherboard, if prices of NVMe dropped I might get one if I need more storage, don't need it yet.)

I'm interested in the 2TB version. It's listed as being available starting next week. The price is right compared to all of the other M.2 drives of that size.

for Robbo9999; the nvme drives are day and night real world over SATA 3. i made the mistake of loading AOTS and Cuphead to my SATA 3 ssd (running out of C: space) and the difference was huge. as in several minutes vs under 30 sec. i slowly migrated to all ssd from spinners (now only in NAS) and that was a huge jump in performance. the difference between nvme and SATA doesn't seem at first to be as large a leap, but it is. granted you are going from several minutes (or more depending on rpm) to less than half of that loading up most games, but as game files have gotten larger the difference between SATA and NVME is much more pronounced. and of course if you're used to manipulating huge files like raw, photoshop, blender, and even compression and batch conversion software the difference is time saved in large measures.

valentyn0:

The winner in these tests, and overall best performance/price ratio goes to the 480gb SX8200 from ADATA, check the price and you'll see what i mean 😉

Thanks for that snippet of info, you're right, I looked into it, and I could get that 480GB SX8200 from ADATA for £100, and performance reviews for that drive are stellar! I really don't need it though, but I'm gonna bookmark it for the future; apparently SSD prices are set to decrease still, and I don't need it now, so I'll just buy it when I need & also therefore at a lower price.

tunejunky:

for Robbo9999; the nvme drives are day and night real world over SATA 3. i made the mistake of loading AOTS and Cuphead to my SATA 3 ssd (running out of C: space) and the difference was huge. as in several minutes vs under 30 sec. i slowly migrated to all ssd from spinners (now only in NAS) and that was a huge jump in performance. the difference between nvme and SATA doesn't seem at first to be as large a leap, but it is. granted you are going from several minutes (or more depending on rpm) to less than half of that loading up most games, but as game files have gotten larger the difference between SATA and NVME is much more pronounced. and of course if you're used to manipulating huge files like raw, photoshop, blender, and even compression and batch conversion software the difference is time saved in large measures.

Thanks for that reply, I wonder why those real world differences you talk about aren't really seen in this Guru3d review though (well apart from the file copy test)? I've bookmarked that ADATA 480GB SX8200 that valentyn0 was talking about above, saving it for a rainy day! Like you have, I also have no spinners in my PC, just x2 SATA3 SSD's: 480GB Sandisk Ultra II as boot drive, 525GB Crucial MX300 as game & content (some game & content on the other SSD of course though). Got them both for around the £75 mark in Black Friday sales, the Sandisk I bought back in Nov 2015, and the Crucial I bought in Nov 2016.

This is one speedy, chart topping drive! Well done Corsair!

I've had a few sata3 ssd drives installed for couple of years then got a corsair nx500 400GB pcie nvme it was night and day compared to sata3 so much faster ….but had to take it out as msi carbon x370 didn't like nx500 (400gb)...mp510 (960gb)...970evo (500gb) ...with rx2080 still have 3xsata3 2x crucial ssd 1T and 1 Samsung 860 ssd 500GB ...sata3 was improvement over harddrive nvme is a lot faster than sata3 ssd regardless wether transferring large files or game loading times …...just wish I could get all drives working at 1 time, might be time for x570

bpsback:

I've had a few sata3 drives installed for couple of years then got a corsair nx500 400GB pcie nvme it was night and day compared to sata3 so much faster

I think i read your post wrong(this is an edited post), i assume you are talking about SATA 3 HDDs vs NVME drives? If so, then i understand your post, if it's SATA 3 SSDs vs NVME m.2 drives, then i don't understand what you're saying, real-world useages barely find any differences between SATA 3 SSDs and NVME m.2 SSDs

Aura89:

I think i read your post wrong(this is an edited post), i assume you are talking about SATA 3 HDDs vs NVME drives? If so, then i understand your post, if it's SATA 3 SSDs vs NVME m.2 drives, then i don't understand what you're saying, real-world useages barely find any differences between SATA 3 SSDs and NVME m.2 SSDs

thanx ...just seen errors in post and corrected ...yes ssd's are better than HD but when you get use to speed of ssd then move to m.2 nvme drive there is a big difference in speed especially with some games there is no loading times and things just feel that bit smoother ...for example just cause 3 or battlefield 5

bpsback:

thanx ...just seen errors in post and corrected ...yes ssd's are better than HD but when you get use to speed of ssd then move to m.2 nvme drive there is a big difference in speed especially with some games there is no loading times and things just feel that bit smoother ...for example just cause 3 or battlefield 5

Yeah ok i don't understand what you're saying then, as there is minimal affect to boot speed or game boot speed between NVME m.2 SSD drives and SATA SSD drives. The main place you'll see the difference is in benchmarks and large data transfers between NVME and NVME. [youtube=V3AMz-xZ2VM] [youtube=OjWUGsQNSvE] [youtube=GCDQaE9N-eo] I ofcourse am not saying there is NO difference, as you can see, in some games there is half a second to a full second faster.....which isn't enough to be night and day differences, the likelyhood you'd even notice is unlikely. Your SSD you are comparing your NVME drive to must have been a really low performing, possibly dying SSD, to show you a real world difference between the two and be noticeable. And yes, i have an NVME M.2 samsung drive, and 3 SSDs, and one HDD hooked up to my system, so i'm not just posting youtube videos as though i have no experiences. I do, and there's no discernible difference unless your previous SSD was a really, really badly performing SSD.