Specifications & Features
Specifications & Features
Corsair is offering three versions of the CORE SSD, they start at 1TB, 2TB and the biggest one can hold 4TB. For endurance, our tested 2TB model has been rated at 400 TBW. The series will be fitted with QLC written NAND flash memory (vertically stacked). This allows the company to offer the proper storage volumes. So instead of using Planar NAND, 3D NAND is used. 3D QLC and 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.
More stacking means cost reduction as you increase the cell count per layer, smaller sizes, and this more capacity per NAND chip. Unleashed by the PCIe 4.0 ready AMD B550/X570 and soon Z590 chipsets, the M.2 SSD reaches up to an advertised 5000 MB/sec sequential read – ten times the performance of many SATA SSDs, and fifty times faster than some hard disk drives. The unit 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, and high-density NAND flash combined with a Phison PS5016-E16 controller to enable a new level of single-drive SSD performance.
Phison PS5016-E16 controller
The first PCIe 4.0 compliant SSD controller is and was the PS5016-E16, introduced by Phison, and is manufactured with a 28 nm process. It supports flash memory connections up to 8 channels and can support up to 8TB of NAND. A DRAM cache has a capacity of 1/1,000 of the total NAND capacity. In order to support 8TB, two DRAMs (4GB x 2) need to be installed, and so on, so at this stage, 2TB is the maximum capacity of general installed products. The nominal value for such NVMe SSDS are roughly is 5000 MB/s for reads and ~4400MB / s for writes. That is about 40% faster than the high-end class SSD of PCIe 3.0 x4. Corsair is paring 1 GB of DRAM for both the 1 TB and 2TB storage units, the 4 TB version will get 2 GB DRAM cache.
