This is our first review of a SSD with the new Phison E27T controller. Phison's naming-scheme is chronological, so E27 is still PCI-Express Gen 4, despite the E26 being PCIe 5.0. First announced at Computex last year, and also shown at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, this new controller is designed to replace the aging E21T, which we've seen on drives like the Corsair MP600 GS. The new E27T offers much better power efficiency, while still being built on a cost-efficient 12 nanometer production process at TSMC. Corsair has paired the E27T controller with 2 TB of 3D TLC NAND flash from Toshiba, using their newest 162-layer design. As excepted for a cost-optimized drive, the MP600 Elite is a DRAM-less design, the E27T controller is optimized for that and there's also 64 MB of Host-Memory-Buffer (HMB). HMB allocates a tiny portion of the system's memory to help store the mapping tables of the SSD, to boost performance.

Synthetic performance results of the Corsair MP600 Elite are very impressive, they are actually topping our charts. Phison has a long history of optimizing their controllers for typical synthetic reviewer workloads on an empty drive, but still that's some nice gains. I really like that mixed IO results are excellent, because during typical usage you'll never just have reads, or just writes. Actual usage patterns are always a mix of read and write operations, that's why mixed IO performance matters a lot. Our real-life testing runs actual games and applications, it does not replay disk traces, which means time spent on the CPU is realistically factored into the performance results. We also test with the drive filled to 80% of its capacity. This approach puts additional strain on the various algorithms and the SLC cache, just like in real-life. In this testing the MP600 Elite does very well, too, and is able to beat famous drives like the Samsung 980 and 980 Pro, Hynix Gold P31 and it's really close to the WD SN850, Solidigm P44 Pro and Kingston KC3000—all of those are eight-channel designs, while the MP600 Elite makes do with only four channels. There's still a bunch of drives that are faster, like the Lexar NM790, Samsung 990 Pro and WD Black SN770, and of course the PCIe Gen 5 drives, which are much more expensive though.

Corsair's drive comes with an SLC cache size of just 48 GB, which is tiny by today's standards, especially on a 2 TB drive. No idea why Corsair picked such a small size, I reached out to them, asking if they can share some insights into why this size was chosen. While 48 GB is still plenty for nearly all workloads, it's still smaller than virtually all competing drives. Filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at 1.4 GB/s, which is a very good result, considering the drive's positioning.

Our power consumption tests show that the Phison E27T is a highly energy-efficient design. It is able to successfully enter the lowest-power L1 ASPM power state, which is important for mobile devices, to not drain the battery when idle. Energy efficiency during ready and writes is near the top of our charts, but there's still some more efficient designs, most notably the Maxiotech MAP1602 on drives like the Lexar NM790.

Thermal performance of the MP600 Elite is good, thanks to its preinstalled heatsink. There's almost no thermal throttling, we had to hammer the uncooled drive with non-stop writes for over 10 minutes, to see a small slowdown—not an issue in real-life at all.

According to Corsair, the MP600 Elite 2 TB with heatsink will sell for $170, which is a not unreasonable price, that's still a bit on the high side. You might be thinking, "What? I purchased a 4 TB SSD for the same amount last year." Times have changed and SSD prices have gone up considerably. For example, the Lexar NM790 4 TB is now $250, the 2 TB model sells for $130, which still makes it an excellent deal and the strongest competitor to the MP600 Elite. You're getting higher performance, lower energy usage and less heat output at a cheaper price. Another noteworthy alternative is the Samsung 990 Pro 2 TB, which sells for $170 currently. Also worth mentioning is WD SN770 for $110, and keep an eye on the SN580 pricing, too. Overall, the MP600 Elite is a good new release that helps Corsair strengthen its position in the value segment, but the pricing is still a bit too high to make it a strong alternative to the Lexar NM790 and other MAP1602-based drives. I guess some people who really dislike the Chinese controller and NAND flash on these SSDs could be willing to pay the premium for a Taiwanese controller paired with Japanese flash?