With the MP700 Pro SE, Corsair is releasing a 14 GB/s PCIe Gen 5 SSD, which offers incredible performance right up to the limit of the new Gen 5 interface. These speeds are only possible thanks to Micron 232-layer NAND chips running at 2400 MT/s. The 10 GB/s and 12 GB/s Gen 5 SSDs use the same NAND, but at lower speeds of 1600 MT/s and 2000 MT/s. Unlike many other vendors, Corsair isn't bundling a heatsink with their drive, which isn't completely unreasonable, because there's probably a lot of people that will use their motherboard's cooling solution anyway. Just like on all other Gen 5 SSDs in the market, the MP700 Pro SE uses the Phison E26 controller.

Synthetic performance results of the MP700 Pro SE are impressive, and as expected, sequential read and write is increased, but we noticed a small performance regression in sequential mixed. We can confirm that Corsair's "up to 14 GB/s" claim is accurate (for sequential writes at QD8 and higher). Marketing materials for Gen 5 all focus on blazing fast sequential transfers. The reason is that random IO performance is virtually identical to the results of PCIe Gen 4 drives, like the Phison E18-based Kingston KC3000.

Phison has a long history of optimizing their controllers for typical synthetic reviewer workloads on an empty drive. That's why it's important to also include real-life testing. We're even running those tests with the drives filled to 85% capacity, not empty. This approach puts additional pressure on the various algorithms and the SLC cache, just like in real-life. With this review, we're introducing our new 2024 SSD Test Suite, which updates the game selection and adds new tests like AI and Git on a new hardware platform with native Gen 5 slot. Here the Corsair MP700 Pro SE does excellently and comes out as the fastest SSD we've ever tested. Compared to the Corsair MP700 Pro (which uses the same hardware, but with slower 12 GB/s maximum), the performance uplift is around 2%, which is expected, because very few real-life workloads scale with such high sequential transfer rates. Compared to Gen 4 SSDs, the performance uplift is around 5-10%, which is a repeat of what we've seen from the first Gen 4 drives, when compared to Gen 3 SSDs.

Corsair's drive comes with an SLC cache size of 30%, or 400 GB, which is enough to soak up nearly all bursts of write activity, and it has the benefit that sustained rates are much better. First-gen PCIe 5.0 SSDs had a bigger SLC cache of 600 GB, but got penalized when that cache was full, so they filled their whole capacity at an average of 1.5 GB/s, whereas Corsair's new SSD more than doubles that to 3.3 GB/s—very impressive.

Our power consumption testing confirms that the Corsair MP700 Pro SE really uses a lot of power. We've measured up to 11 W, which is essentially 50% more than what we've seen on Phison's E18 Gen 4 controller. Hitting 11 W is quite rare though, you should rather plan with 5-6 W during typical loads, which is still a lot for an M.2 SSD. Of course, you're getting higher performance at the same time, but our numbers show that even when running at only 1 or 2 GB/s, the power consumption is still high. It seems that once the controller goes out of idle, it will always use 4 W at least, no matter how little actual work it does (same as earlier Phison E26 models that we've tested). Read operation energy efficiency appears lower, because in our testing, the sequential reads are limited to 6 GB/s (same as in the synthetic read workload).

According to Corsair, the MP700 Pro SE 4 TB will be priced at $635, there's only a 4 TB model available at this time. No doubt, the speeds are impressive, and 4 TB is tons of space, but that's a lot of money for just storage. I'm not sure how Corsair came up with $635, because the Crucial T705 4 TB, which uses the exact same hardware as the MP700 Pro SE is currently listed online for $543—almost $100 cheaper! I asked Corsair and their reply was that $635 is the MSRP and the actual street price will be lower than that. If you can live with "only" 12 GB/s, then you could grab a Crucial T700 for $400. Still, even $400 is A LOT of money for a 4 TB SSD, but the M.2 options are limited, especially in this capacity range. An interesting option is the WD Black SN850X 4 TB, which sells for $320, the Samsung 990 Pro 4 TB for $310, or the Lexar NM790 4 TB for $250, all of which are considerably less expensive, yet offer very similar performance using a PCIe Gen 4 interface.