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 are taking a look at the Corsair MP600 Mini, a highly compact M.2 NVMe drive that embraces the 2230 form factor, boasting a mere 30 mm length. Its compact dimensions make it an ideal companion for the Valve Steam Deck. Additionally, the MP600 Mini serves as a viable choice for expanding the storage on the ASUS ROG Ally gaming console and various Microsoft Surface Pro devices. The drive is also compatible with other systems requiring the use of an M.2 2242 SSD.

In recent weeks we have reviewed several other M.2 2230 SSDs, which are all based on the same hardware design from Phison: a Phison E21 controller is paired with Micron 176-layer 3D QLC NAND flash. The only exception to that is the WD Black SN770M, which uses only WD in-house components. The MP600 Mini in this review uses the Phison E21 controller, too, but it is built with TLC NAND and not QLC like on most of the competing drives. The flash chips are made by Micron, just like on the QLC models, but they use 176-layer TLC technology. As expected, a DRAM cache chip is absent due to space limitations. The drive interfaces with the rest of the system through the PCI-Express 4.0 interface.

The Corsair MP600 Mini is only available in a 1 TB capacity, which retails for $80. Corsair includes a five-year warranty with the MP600 Mini SSD.

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 TLC NAND, with a capacity of 1 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.