pSLC Cache / Write Intensive Usage

When copying games from your Steam Library, or other very large files (>10 GB), you may notice that write speeds on your SSD start at full speed, before dropping considerably. The underlying reason is that modern drives have small, fast caches, that soak up write bursts to improve performance. In the fairly uncommon scenario of writing data that's too big to fit into these caches, the drive will have to write data directly to flash, and it will probably juggle some out of its write cache at the same time, which can result in a significant loss of write speed. Newer TLC drives use part of their capacity in SLC mode for increased performance. This test can reveal the size of that pseudo-SLC cache.

The testing methodology used on this page simulates such a scenario. We write a sequential stream of 1 MB blocks to the drive in a single thread, like a typical file-copy operation would do, and measure write speeds twice a second. Please note that some other publications test this at higher queue depth, which will yield bigger numbers, that are less relevant to real-world scenarios. The drive is fully erased before testing, to ensure any caches are emptied. This test generates a heavy write load with lots of data, something that most people don't do regularly—typical consumer workloads involve shorter bursts of write activity.


Write speed starts out at around 4.7 GB/s, which is very impressive for single-threaded write speeds. These speeds are sustained until 49 GB have been written—a really tiny SLC cache, especially for a modern 2 TB SSD in 2024. This cache size is among the smallest I've seen in many years, no idea why Corsair picked such a small setting. It's the same setting as on the MP600 Elite, so no improvement here. Once the SLC cache is full, speeds fall off a cliff, to only 700 MB/s, which is pretty slow, but still much better than what we've seen on the competing QLC drives. Filling the whole capacity completes at 769 MB/s on average, which isn't that impressive when compared to full-size M.2 drives, but it's actually one of the best results for M.2 2230.