Corsair MP700 Pro 2 TB

[W1zzard]

than the PNY CS3150 drive announced earlier today

We'll know soon. I have it here for review

 

[kapone32]

The more gen5 drives I see the more gen5 makes 0 sense to me, all the extra heat and power for literally no real world performance difference over say a 2tb p44 pro, i mean that you would actually be able to notice realistically I should say. and a passive heatsink is all you need there, and the solidgm lightweight driver to increase its iops

I used to feel that way. That is probably why I bought 1 TB but I can tell you that if you are into PC you will enjoy having a 5.0 drive as your boot drive. They do everything faster in feel on desktop. That goes from loading Windows to loading HWinfo64. I was using a Firecuda 530 2TB as OS drive before that. Even copying Windows took less than 6 minutes using Seagate Diskwizard.

 

[Chrispy_]

I used to feel that way. That is probably why I bought 1 TB but I can tell you that if you are into PC you will enjoy having a 5.0 drive as your boot drive. They do everything faster in feel on desktop. That goes from loading Windows to loading HWinfo64. I was using a Firecuda 530 2TB as OS drive before that. Even copying Windows took less than 6 minutes using Seagate Diskwizard.

Actual test results for application loads, OS bootup, and just about every other possible metrics show that there should be marginal difference in performance between your Firecuda 530 and a PCIe 5.0 drive like this. It's effectively a rebranded Kingston KC3000 in the charts of this review and the MP700 Pro isn't always the clear winner. Multiple independent, reputable reviewers have all run different batteries of synthetic and real-world tests and the Firecuda or KC3000 trades blows with the MP700 Pro in almost all scenarios, except in purely synthetic sustained sequential reads/writes where the PCIe bandwidth finally becomes the bottleneck. Not even optimal real-world, ideal scenarios like sequential copies of huge files shows any significant improvement because OS, driver, and file-system overheads still hold the drive back enough that the PCIe 4.0 x4 bandwidth isn't the limiting factor.

If anything, you experiencing any kind of noticeable difference between the two drives just shows that there was a configuration issue or something else horribly wrong with your Firecuda 530 install. Perhaps it was cooking itself and permanently throttling, running off chipset lanes with additional latency, or perhaps you're comparing a clean OS install to a dirty one on the old Firecuda 530.

 

[kapone32]

Actual test results for application loads, OS bootup, and just about every other possible metrics show that there should be marginal difference in performance between your Firecuda 530 and a PCIe 5.0 drive like this. It's effectively a rebranded Kingston KC3000 in the charts of this review and the MP700 Pro isn't always the clear winner. Multiple independent, reputable reviewers have all run different batteries of synthetic and real-world tests and the Firecuda or KC3000 trades blows with the MP700 Pro in almost all scenarios, except in purely synthetic sustained sequential reads/writes where the PCIe bandwidth finally becomes the bottleneck. Not even optimal real-world, ideal scenarios like sequential copies of huge files shows any significant improvement because OS, driver, and file-system overheads still hold the drive back enough that the PCIe 4.0 x4 bandwidth isn't the limiting factor.

If anything, you experiencing any kind of noticeable difference between the two drives just shows that there was a configuration issue or something else horribly wrong with your Firecuda 530 install. Perhaps it was cooking itself and permanently throttling, running off chipset lanes with additional latency, or perhaps you're comparing a clean OS install to a dirty one on the old Firecuda 530.

I am going based on replacing my OS drive in a PC I use everyday and how it feels to do everything once I changed drives. Have you seen the heatsink on the X670E-E Strix? The OS drive goes into the first M2 slot. Maybe it is how my board is wired as 5.0 is all over so maybe I am hitting a new level of what the board can do. I have not done any Game files yet (too busy Gaming) but I promise you it feels faster.

 

[Chrispy_]

I am going based on replacing my OS drive in a PC I use everyday and how it feels to do everything once I changed drives. Have you seen the heatsink on the X670E-E Strix? The OS drive goes into the first M2 slot. Maybe it is how my board is wired as 5.0 is all over so maybe I am hitting a new level of what the board can do. I have not done any Game files yet (too busy Gaming) but I promise you it feels faster.

View attachment 321679

Pass. Did you clone your OS onto the 530? Partition offset etc?

I'm not saying I don't believe you that it feels faster, but multiple professional reviewers have run multiple tests and the difference between the drives is so small that you wouldn't notice them as a human. For 99% of the common day-to-day things you'd do that use the SSD, the drives are within 2-3% of the same speed, trading wins and losses. Everyone's different but presmably you need at least a 10% margin to actually notice a difference. In reality, we're talking about waiting 11.5 seconds instead of 11.2 seconds. Would you even be able to accurately time that with a stopwatch, let alone notice it if you weren't paying attention?

Outside of synthetic tests which read data to NULL and do nothing with it, or generate zero-overhead data in RAM, you're not going to see anywhere near the PCIe 5.0 bandwidth advantage being used much, if at all. I'll admit that I've never actually used a PCIe 5.0 consumer drive, but I've been dealing with PCIe 5.0 enterprise drives on our newest HP server for a few months now.

 

[kapone32]

Pass. Did you clone your OS onto the 530? Partition offset etc?

I'm not saying I don't believe you that it feels faster, but multiple professional reviewers have run multiple tests and the difference between the drives is so small that you wouldn't notice them as a human. For 99% of the common day-to-day things you'd do that use the SSD, the drives are within 2-3% of the same speed, trading wins and losses. Everyone's different but presmably you need at least a 10% margin to actually notice a difference. In reality, we're talking about waiting 11.5 seconds instead of 11.2 seconds. Would you even be able to accurately time that with a stopwatch, let alone notice it if you weren't paying attention?

Outside of synthetic tests which read data to NULL and do nothing with it, or generate zero-overhead data in RAM, you're not going to see anywhere near the PCIe 5.0 bandwidth advantage being used much, if at all. I'll admit that I've never actually used a PCIe 5.0 consumer drive, but I've been dealing with PCIe 5.0 enterprise drives on our newest HP server for a few months now.

I used Seagate Diskwizard to clone the OS. It literally took about 6 minutes. The thing is I use this PC everyday for about 10+ hours so everything is felt. I will put it another way, you know how going from the 2600 to the 3600 could be felt? Well that is what I feel with the MP700 as my boot drive. Maybe it is the controller, maybe it is the type of RAM used on the drive but I promise you it feels much snappier than it did before, to use the PC. That is the only thing I can base it on.

 

[Chrispy_]

I will put it another way, you know how going from the 2600 to the 3600 could be felt? Well that is what I feel with the MP700 as my boot drive. Maybe it is the controller, maybe it is the type of RAM used on the drive but I promise you it feels much snappier than it did before, to use the PC. That is the only thing I can base it on.

Yeah, that would make sense. The 3600 was never less than 15% faster than the 2600, typically 30% faster, and sometimes even more than that.
It sounds like, for whatever reason, you weren't seeing the full performance of your Firecuda.

 

[avel]

• Quiet cooler

That’s a lie and you know it.

 

[Space Lynx]

I used to feel that way. That is probably why I bought 1 TB but I can tell you that if you are into PC you will enjoy having a 5.0 drive as your boot drive. They do everything faster in feel on desktop. That goes from loading Windows to loading HWinfo64. I was using a Firecuda 530 2TB as OS drive before that. Even copying Windows took less than 6 minutes using Seagate Diskwizard.

I understand what you are saying. My favorite drive of all time is still the WD SN770 Black, I have no idea wth is going on its proprietary algorithm, but my god its noticeably faster than any other drive I ever owned. When I buy gen5 it will be the SN880 or w.e they end up calling it. @W1zzard fingers crossed we get another magic drive for gen5, cause even doing two clean installs of windows 10 side by side, the SN770 just feels snappier than say even my KC3000 1tb, its not placebo, I tested side by side, SN770 is legit magic. im not testing stuff you test btw, just clicking on desktop icons, clicking on volume panel, opening file explore, the SN770 is noticeably snappier to me than KC3000.

 

[Vayra86]

Thanks for the great review. For me, I'm still on AM4 so won't be buying, but I will not upgrade to Gen5 anyway until it's more mature and active cooling for drives is not required.

yeah, this. Why this makes it to market in the first place is mind blowing imho. What the actual. A separate fan on each storage device. Kindly gtfo

 

[W1zzard]

That’s a lie and you know it.

It is quiet, it is not the full-speed Phison reference heatsink

 

[Chrispy_]

I understand what you are saying. My favorite drive of all time is still the WD SN770 Black, I have no idea wth is going on its proprietary algorithm, but my god its noticeably faster than any other drive I ever owned. When I buy gen5 it will be the SN880 or w.e they end up calling it. @W1zzard fingers crossed we get another magic drive for gen5, cause even doing two clean installs of windows 10 side by side, the SN770 just feels snappier than say even my KC3000 1tb, its not placebo, I tested side by side, SN770 is legit magic. im not testing stuff you test btw, just clicking on desktop icons, clicking on volume panel, opening file explore, the SN770 is noticeably snappier to me than KC3000.

Hmm, I will have a look at this. I have a 2TB SN770 as a games drive on one of my machines, and an, uh.. (checks notes) SX8200 Pro as an OS drive. Jesus, that's not even PCIe 4.0!

Shouldn't take long to swap the contents over and move the SN770 to the CPU-connected M.2 slot.

 

[Space Lynx]

Hmm, I will have a look at this. I have a 2TB SN770 as a games drive on one of my machines, and an, uh.. (checks notes) SX8200 Pro as an OS drive. Jesus, that's not even PCIe 4.0!

Shouldn't take long to swap the contents over and move the SN770 to the CPU-connected M.2 slot.

yeah, there is something in the SN770 algorithm and controller where dram'less doesn't matter at all, and it just makes everything feel "snappy" thats honestly the best word I can use to describe it. I recall in Windows 11 and 10 testing of different drives, in Win 11 specifically the volume slider bar in right hand corner had a 0.5 micro second delay in opening on the KC3000, but on SN770 it was instantaneous like it knew i was about to click on it, wild stuff.

SN770 really is magic, though that isn't why w1zz calls it magic in his review of the SN770, but I bought it cause of his review and that has been my experience.

I honestly may not even go to a gen5 drive, SN770 really impresses me, especially since i just do casual gaming, i don't need anything crazy

 

[Chrispy_]

How weird. I have an Asus 8th Gen Intel laptop to my right with some OEM Gen3 rubbish SSD (Micron 1100, which I've never seen a review of) and the W11 volume slider is 100% instant on the release of the mouse button. My W11 HTPC (5800X3D) using an SN570 (close relative to the SN770) has that fractional delay you talk about.

 

[chrcoluk]

So this is the fixed version after the beta one got reviewed in May.

 

[Artie]

I guess this makes sense if you absolutely need that performance and have the platform for it. For just about anyone else a decent 2-4 TB TLC drive is way more preferable.

 

[kapone32]

I guess this makes sense if you absolutely need that performance and have the platform for it. For just about anyone else a decent 2-4 TB TLC drive is way more preferable.

I understand what you are saying. My favorite drive of all time is still the WD SN770 Black, I have no idea wth is going on its proprietary algorithm, but my god its noticeably faster than any other drive I ever owned. When I buy gen5 it will be the SN880 or w.e they end up calling it. @W1zzard fingers crossed we get another magic drive for gen5, cause even doing two clean installs of windows 10 side by side, the SN770 just feels snappier than say even my KC3000 1tb, its not placebo, I tested side by side, SN770 is legit magic. im not testing stuff you test btw, just clicking on desktop icons, clicking on volume panel, opening file explore, the SN770 is noticeably snappier to me than KC3000.

F me if you want to talk about favourite drives the Intel 660P was the best QLC drive I ever had but OCZ Revodrive3 has a special place in my heart and even though it only gave 800 Mb/s it still gave me 20 more FPS in TW Shogun2