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.



Back in February 2021, we reviewed the Corsair MP600 Pro, which at the time was one of the first true high-end PCIe 4.0 drives. It was also the first drive we reviewed with the Phison E18 controller. Almost exactly one year has passed since then, and PCI-Express 4.0 is a standard capability that's now available on many SSDs, with several controller choices, if you're willing to pay for it.

Last year, Sony announced that their PlayStation 5 supports M.2 NVMe drives for storage upgrades. There are some requirements, like minimum speed, the requirement for a heatsink, and, of course, a heatsink size limit to ensure the SSD fits into the PS5 case opening. We've seen various PS5-compatible SSDs in recent months, but as far as I know, the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX is the first one specifically optimized for the requirements of Sony's console, both in terms of physical design and firmware tweaks. A noteworthy heatsink design alternative is this one by Sabrent.

Under the hood, the MP600 Pro LPX is powered by the Phison E18 controller—same as on the normal MP600 Pro. The NAND flash chips have been upgraded to the newest and fastest 176-layer 3D TLC from Micron—the MP600 Pro uses 96-layer Micron. As expected for a high-end drive, the MP600 Pro LPX has a DRAM-cache, too: 2 GB of DDR4 from Hynix.

The Corsair MP600 Pro LPX comes in capacities of 500 GB ($100), 1 TB ($170), 2 TB ($340), and 4 TB ($785). Endurance for these models is set to 350 TBW, 700 TBW, 1400 TBW, and 3000 TBW respectively. Corsair provides a five-year warranty for the MP600 Pro LPX.

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 transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX 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, eight flash chips, and two DRAM chips.


Corsair's MP600 Pro LPX comes with the heatsink preinstalled. It's a sleek metal clamshell design that fits the PS5 case perfectly. The mounting mechanism uses four screws and sticky thermal paste.


Installing the MP600 Pro LPX into the Sony PS5 is straightforward: just plop in the drive and screw it down. Images courtesy of Corsair.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's 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 eight flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


Two Hynix DDR4-3200 chips provide a total of 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup