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 this 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, Team Group MP44S and Addlink S91. While the SN770M is based on TLC paired with an in-house WD controller, the two latter are using the Phison E21 and QLC NAND flash from Micron. As you probably know, a lot of people prefer TLC NAND over QLC, because of its better performance and endurance, especially when writing lots of data. That's exactly why I've asked Corsair to get a chance to look at the MP600 Mini. While it uses the same Phison E21 the competition, Corsair has put 176-layer TLC NAND from Micron on their drive, and not QLC. Given the limited 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 the DRAM-less design. Surprisingly, the Team Group MP44S, which is E21+QLC, shows slightly better numbers in the synthetics. 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 strain on the various algorithms and the SLC cache, just like in real-life.

In our real-life test suite, the MP600 Mini definitely beats the QLC models, by 5% on average, which is solid, but less than I expected, and still far behind what we've seen from the WD Black SN770M. It seems that the drive's very small pseudo-SLC cache is responsible for that. With just 64 GB it is smaller than on virtually every modern SSD in our test group—no idea why they picked such a tiny SLC size. You get 64 GB on an empty drive, so when we're testing at 80% disk full, the actual available SLC capacity is much less than that.

The small SLC cache does have a benefit though. Once it is full, the drive still has tons of empty space to handle both incoming writes and moving data from SLC into TLC. In our "fill the whole drive" test, we saw fantastic results that are much better than all the other M.2 2230 drives. While the QLC-based Phison E21 drives were able to fill their whole capacity at only 122 MB/s, the WD Black SN770M with TLC topped that to 442 MB/s. The MP600 Mini is in a completely different world, reaching 1315 MB/s, more than 10x (!) what the QLC models achieved. If you plan on writing a lot of data, then the MP600 Mini is what you want.

However, do consider that the portable consoles 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 so much data in such a short time anyway.

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 18 seconds, which is still an impressive 80 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 Mini 1 TB is currently listed online for $80, which is a pretty steep price for a 1 TB SSD. A comparable desktop SSD can be found for less than $40. No doubt, small-form-factor gear always comes at a premium. Interestingly, the QLC SSDs with the same controller are selling at the same $80 price point, so it's probably a better choice to pick the Corsair MP600 Mini. Strong competition comes from the WD Black SN770M, which is $80, too, but offers much better real-life performance, even though its sustained writes are only a fraction of what's possible on the MP600 Mini. Solidigm P41 Plus 1 TB is only $45 at the moment, but I'm not sure what performance it offers. The biggest drawback of the MP600 Mini is certainly that it's only available in a 1 TB model while others can be found as 2 TB version, too.