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.



In this review, we are examining the Corsair MP600 Core Mini, a remarkably compact M.2 NVMe drive designed in the 2230 form factor, measuring just 30 mm in length. Its petite dimensions make it a suitable storage enhancement for the Valve Steam Deck. Additionally, the SSD can serve as a storage expansion solution for the ASUS ROG Ally game console and various Microsoft Surface Pro devices. It is worth noting that the drive is compatible with scenarios requiring the use of an M.2 2242 PCIe drive.

While M.2 2230 drives have been present in the market for some time, their availability has typically been restricted to smaller capacities. The Corsair MP600 Core Mini breaks this trend by offering capacities of 1 TB and 2 TB, a feature that was previously uncommon in this form factor. Notably, there has been a recent influx of similar drives with increased storage options in the M.2 2230 category.

Internally, the MP600 Core Mini uses a Phison E21 controller, which we've seen on many other drives before. The NAND flash is 176-layer QLC from Micron. A DRAM cache chip is not installed, due to the limited space available. To connect with the rest of the system, the PCI-Express 4.0 interface is used. There's also the "MP600 Mini" without "Core," which uses the same Phison E21 controller, but comes with TLC NAND flash, I've reviewed it here.

The Corsair MP600 Core Mini is available in capacities of 1 TB ($95) and 2 TB ($200). Endurance for these models is set to 250 TBW and 450 TBW, respectively. Corsair includes a five-year warranty with the MP600 Core Mini.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the highly compact M.2 2230 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and only 30 mm long.


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the SSD controller and one flash chip. A DRAM cache is not available.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5021-E21 is Phison's newest PCI-Express 4.0 controller. It's a cost-optimized model, with four flash channels and support for TLC and QLC NAND. Phison has designed the E21 for DRAM-less operation, and it supports the NVMe 1.4 protocol. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


There's just one flash chip, a Micron 176-layer 3D QLC NAND, with a capacity of 2 TB.

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.

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 600 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 80% of their capacity
• Partitions are properly aligned.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.