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.



The Corsair MP600 Pro SSD is a high-end M.2 NVMe SSD that introduces support for the PCI-Express 4.0 interface. Internally, the MP600 Pro uses the new eight-channel Phison E18 controller paired with Intel 96-layer TLC flash. A Hynix DRAM chip provides 1 GB of storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The Corsair MP600 Pro comes in capacities of 1 TB ($225) and 2 TB ($435). Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW and 1400 TBW respectively. There's also a watercooled MP600 Pro Hydro X, which uses a waterblock instead of the metal heatsink and costs $460. Corsair provides a five-year warranty for the MP600 Pro.

Packaging

The Drive

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


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs use the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Corsair MP600 Pro connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and one DRAM chip.


The metal heatsink is preinstalled. A wraparound type of housing soaks up heat through thermal pads on the front and back.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's new PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The four flash chips are Micron 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


A Hynix DDR4-2666 chip provides 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup