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.



Corsair was one of the first vendors to launch a PCI-Express 5.0 SSD, we reviewed the drive in May and it had some shortcomings, most importantly, the lack of a dedicated heatsink and the fact that the drive would crash when overheating (instead of throttling). Today, the Corsair MP700 Pro launches, which addresses all these aspects and more. While the original MP700 was rated for 10 GB/s, the new MP700 Pro reaches 12 GB/s, which means it achieves parity with the fastest Gen 5 SSDs from other vendors. Under the hood, not much has changed. You're still getting a Phison E26 controller, which at this time is the only PCIe 5.0 controller in mass production. As expected the E26 is paired with new firmware. While the NAND flash chips are still Micron's newest B58R 3D TLC NAND with 232-layers, they are now running at a speed of 2000 MT/s instead of 1600 MT/s, which is the mechanism behind the increased transfer rates. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.

The Corsair MP700 Pro (with heatsink) is available in capacities of 1 TB ($190), 2 TB ($325). There's also a model without heatsink for $180 / $300, and the water-cooling-ready Hydro X 2 TB variant costs $325, too. Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW and 1400 TBW, respectively. Corsair includes a five-year warranty with the MP700 Pro 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.


Corsair's small cooler looks very solid, with a lot of mass and a tiny little fan inside.


It is held together with four screws, which ensure it doesn't come apart over time. There's thermal pads on the front and back, but I wonder why these are smaller than the actual chips they cover. Still, thermal performance is good.


The cooler is powered through a SATA cable, which is a bulky solution that also makes it difficult to control the fan speed. The actual fan speed is fixed, not temperature controlled. There's also no fan-stop, so the fan is always running, even when idle (but pretty quiet). Some vendors are using a fan cable with PWM header here, which lets you connect the cooler to the motherboard, which enables easy fan control.

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, using an Arm Cortex design. 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.

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.