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 MP700 SSD, which is the first production-grade PCI-Express 5.0 solid-state-drive to hit our labs. While there has been talk about these drives for months, and we have seen them demo'd at various events, they really haven't made it to the market in significant volume yet. All the "Gen 5" SSDs right now are based on the Phison E26 controller, which is the only controller available at this time with support for the new interface. Other vendors like Samsung, WD, Kioxia, Silicon Motion and Innogrit are working on their own designs, but have nothing to show yet. As NAND flash the Corsair drive is using Micron's newest B58R 3D TLC NAND with 232-layers. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache chip is included.

The Corsair MP700 is available in capacities of 1 TB ($160), 2 TB ($290). Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW and 1400 TBW, respectively. Corsair includes a five-year warranty with the MP700 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 5.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, a single DRAM cache chip is included, too.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5026-E26 is Phison's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller. It is the company's current flagship with support for eight flash channels and NVMe 2.0. It uses an Arm Cortex design with support for NVMe 2.0. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


One Hynix DDR4-4266 chip provides a total of 4 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

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.