The available M.2 SSD form factors have been pretty constant over the past years. Basically everything uses the M.2 2280 format, which makes the drives 22 mm wide and 80 mm long. No doubt, these dimensions are great for desktops and most laptops. With the release of the Steam Deck and ROG Ally portable game consoles, this status quo has changed. An 80 mm SSD is suddenly pretty big, considering the whole Steam Deck is just 30 cm long and 12 cm wide. That's why these new consoles use drives built on the smaller M.2 2230 form factor—just 3 cm long.

When buying a Steam Deck from Valve you can choose between a 256 GB SSD ($400) and a 512 GB model ($450). Just last month, the company announced their new OLED Steam Decks, which come at a price of $550 for the 512 GB OLED model, and $650 for the 1 TB version. There's also a 64 GB eMMC option for $350, which can be upgraded with an NVMe drive (all hardware versions have an M.2 slot). It looks like with the release of the OLED design, there will be no more eMMC version. Still, it could be a cost-effective approach to get a Steam Deck without spending too much, but you'll need to find a decent M.2 2230 SSD to achieve better storage speeds.

In the past we've reviewed several M.2 2230 drives: WD Black SN770M, Corsar MP600 Mini, Team Group MP44S and Addlink S91. While the SN770M and MP600 Mini are based on TLC, the two latter drives are using the Phison E21 and QLC NAND flash from Micron. The Corsair MP600 Core Mini uses the same hardware as those QLC drives, but Corsair configured it slightly differently. While the Addlink S91 comes with no additional overprovisioning resulting in a user-accessible capacity of 2048 GB, the Corsair MP600 Core Mini has 48 GB additional overprovisioning, which gives the controller some extra room to work with. Given the limited physical space available, a DRAM cache is not included. Higher-end drives have a separate DRAM cache chip that stores a copy of the mapping tables of the SSD. This table helps the controller figure out where a piece of data is located; like most DRAM-less SSDs, the MP600 Mini does use some of the host system's memory, though (HMB or Host-Memory-Buffer). The HMB size is 64 MB.

Synthetic performance results of the Corsair SSD are excellent, the drive is near the top of all charts, despite the entry-level positioning, and DRAM-less QLC. Interestingly, performance in many of those tests is slightly better than the TLC-based MP600 Mini, and the MP600 Core Mini can also beat the WD Black SN770M. Phison has a long history of optimizing their controller and firmware for typical reviewer workloads on an empty drive, maybe the QLC models have received a little bit more love in that regard. That's why it's important to also include real-life testing. We're even running those tests with the drives filled to 80% capacity, not empty. This approach puts additional pressure on the various algorithms and the SLC cache, just like in real-life.

In our real-life tests the MP600 Core Mini does a bit better than the MP44L, which is only 1 TB and has a bit less overprovisioning. Especially in the "Game Write 75 GB" test, the Corsair drive achieves MUCH better results—the bigger OP size definitely helps here. Other tests results are virtually identical, but considering that this is a gaming drive primarily I think Corsair was right to enable more overprovisioning, at the cost of less user-accessible capacity. The WD Black SN770M does considerably better in these tests though, thanks to the combination of TLC NAND and WD's in-house controller. While the comparisons to full-size M.2 NVMe drives show that the MP600 Core Mini is slower, you have to consider the limited space available, and no doubt, the default storage included with the ROG Ally and Steam Deck is even slower. Especially the eMMC drive on the most affordable Steam Deck is rather slow, and any M.2 SSD will result in a much faster experience.

Just like all other modern SSDs, the Corsair MP600 Core Mini comes with a pseudo-SLC cache that absorbs incoming writes at high speed, but uses four times the storage to do so. Our testing reveals that the SLC cache is sized at 458 GB, which means the drive will fill two thirds of its capacity in SLC mode first. This is good, because a large cache allows the drive to soak up bursts of incoming write activity, for example when installing a new game. Once the SLC cache is exhausted, write speeds falls off a cliff, down to only 100 MB/s, due to how slow writing to QLC is. I'm not sure if this will be an issue on the portable consoles, because they are limited in terms of network speed and CPU performance, so it's more likely that you won't be able to exhaust the SLC cache, because you won't be able to write data at 4 GB/s in the first place. Still, filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at a rather slow 139 MB/s.

Due to the small form factor, and lack of a heatsink, the drive will thermally throttle rather quickly when fully loaded. In my testing that happened after 17 seconds, which is still an impressive 70 GB written (i.e. almost a complete game). Here, too, you have to consider that there's no way that the console has data available at a rate of 4 GB/s, rather you'll be limited to around 150 MB/s Wi-Fi 6E speed, or even slower. Even when thermally throttled, you're still getting write speeds of around 1 GB/s, and our testing confirms that there's no thermal throttling during reads, even in worst case, so your actual gaming won't be affected.

Energy efficiency is very important for a portable device, because battery life depends on it. While idle power seems slightly on the high side with 1.4 W, the MP600 makes up for that with impressive efficiency scores when transferring data, both in read and write. Considering that you'll be gaming on a portable console most of the time and it'll rarely be idle for long (because you'll turn it off), I feel that the MP600 is still a good choice, even if battery life is important to you.

The Corsair MP600 Core Mini 2 TB is currently listed online for $200, which is a very steep price for a 2 TB SSD. A comparable desktop SSD can be found for less than $100. No doubt, small-form-factor gear always comes at a premium. Other drives using the same Phison+QLC hardware combo sell for around $170. Strong competition comes from the WD Black SN770M, which is $200, too, but offers much better real-life performance. If you want sustained write performance, then consider the TLC-based Corsair MP600 Mini (without "Core"), but that's only available in a 1 TB version. Solidigm P41 Plus 1 TB is only $45 at the moment, but I'm not sure what performance it offers and it tops out at 1 TB, too.