Introduction

Corsair is a US-based peripherals and hardware company founded in 1994. It is now one of the leading manufacturers for gaming gear, with a portfolio spanning nearly every component you need: DRAM memory modules, flash SSDs, keyboards, mice, cases, cooling, and much more.



Today, we're reviewing the Corsair MP600 Elite solid-state drive. This new SSD is equipped with PCIe Gen 4 support and features a cutting-edge Phison E27T controller—this is our first review of the E27T. With an M.2 2280 form factor, it seamlessly fits into all modern computers and laptops. The NAND flash chips utilized are made by Toshiba, featuring their 162-layer 3D TLC. A DRAM cache chip is not available, to reach the drive's price point.

The Corsair MP600 Elite (with heatsink) is available in capacities of 1 TB ($95) and 2 TB ($170). There's also a model without heatsink for $90 / $165. Endurance for these models is set to 600 TBW and 1200 TBW, respectively. Corsair includes a five-year warranty with the MP600 Elite SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and two flash chips, a DRAM cache is not included.


The drive's cooler is held in-place using a clamshell construction with four screws, which ensures it can't easily come off, even after many years of use.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5027-E27T is Phison's new PCI-Express 4.0 controller optimized for DRAM-less operation, with support for TLC and QLC NAND. It's a four-channel design with support for NVMe 2.0. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The two flash chips are Toshiba 162-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• M.2 drives are tested with a fan blowing on them; that is, except for the results investigating uncooled behavior on the thermal testing page.

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 600 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 80% of their capacity
• Partitions are properly aligned.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.