The Corsair MP600 GS is built using Phison's new E21 controller, which is designed to be a modern replacement to the E19 that powered drives such as the MSI Spatium M450 and WD SN750SE. While the E19 was PCIe 4.0 too, the E21 is an upgraded design built on a 12 nanometer production process at TSMC, definitely improving heat output and thermals. For NAND flash, Corsair opted for the highly-popular Micron 176-layer 3D TLC—can't go wrong with that. As expected, for cost reasons, a DRAM cache is not included, but the E21 controller is especially optimized for DRAM-less operation.

Overall synthetic performance results of the MP600 GS are very impressive. The drive is actually topping our charts, which is unexpected given the market positioning of the drive. Recent Phison-based SSDs have always shown excellent synthetic results; it seems the E21 has been optimized even more for synthetic benchmarks on a mostly empty drive—the way most reviewers test. That's why our real-life testing is so important—it runs actual applications and games, which are much harder to optimize for. Our real-life testing is also performed with 80% of the drive filled, which is a more realistic scenario and limits the drive in the way it uses its pseudo-SLC cache.

The real-life performance is very decent, it matches the best PCIe 3.0 SSDs (that have eight channels and DRAM-cache)—quite an impressive feat. An important win is that the Corsair MP600 GS can match the DRAM-less Samsung 980 SSD, and it's just 1% behind the Hynix Gold P31—the fastest PCIe 3.0 SSD we ever tested. Modern PCIe 4.0 drives are still slightly faster than the MP600 GS. For example both the DRAM-less XPG Atom 50 (IG5220) and the WD Black SN770 are several percent quicker on average, with bigger differences depending on the application. The MSI Spatium M450, which is based on Phison's previous E19 controller is 4% slower, confirmation that Phison has achieved solid improvements with their new controller design. Against value PCIe 3.0 SSDs, the performance uplift is around 10%, aging SATA drives are 25-40% slower.

Just like all other modern TLC drives, the MP600 GS comes with an SLC cache that absorbs incoming writes at high speed, but uses three times the storage to do so. Our testing reveals that the SLC cache is sized at 124 GB, which is surprisingly small for a solid-state drive in 2022. On the other hand, sustained write performance is better than most competitors—we were able to fill the whole 2 TB capacity at 1.45 GB/s, which is a huge improvement over drives such as the WD Blue SN570 (590 MB/s), Samsung 980 (600 MB/s), WD Black SN770 (630 MB/s) and XPG Atom 50 (805 MB/s).

Corsair does not include a heatsink with the MP600 GS, and that's no problem at all. Even in our worst-case thermal load testing, we couldn't get the drive to thermally throttle. Actually, temperatures were very decent, with only 71°C after the drive got hammered with hundreds of GB of incoming writes. The secret sauce is Phison's new controller design, which, as mentioned previously, is produced on a highly efficient 12 nanometer production process, bringing with it better energy efficiency and leading to lower heat output—good job, Phison.

The 2 TB Corsair MP600 GS currently sells for around $180, which makes it reasonably priced given the performance offered and the competitive landscape. However, there's a bunch of candidates that are able to beat the MP600 GS in both price and performance. For example, WD Black SN770 ($150), WD Blue SN570 ($135) and XPG Atom 50 ($165). Especially WD is very aggressive with their pricing at the moment—the WD Black SN850 is only $180—a very compelling choice that gives you much better performance, and DRAM, at a similar price. Prices are always in flux and vary geographically, but I feel like a sub-$150 price point would definitely help the MP600 GS achieve additional sales against these drives from very strong brands.