Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
When it comes to looks, the Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB is a very simple looking NVMe SSD, both in appearance and physical layout. Looking at the photo above, we can see that a small black sticker is included to make it look nice and not expose the components. The sticker contains the company branding, model name, and PCIe generation. However, there is no heatsink to dissipate heat from the drive. Cooling will depend on the heatsink that comes with your motherboard, or you can pick up something like the SilverStone TP05. The Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB is PlayStation 5-compatible, since the total thickness is below 11.25mm.
The Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB is an M.2 2280 format SSD. When it comes to the M.2 physical standard, the M.2 2280 designation means the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm. Its components are located on the black printed circuit board, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. The NVMe 1.4 logical device interface is what the Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB works on. As with any NVMe interface, the MP600 Core XT 2TB plugs into compatible motherboards directly for faster read and write speeds compared to SATA devices. The M.2 NVMe 1.4 interface works over PCIe 4.0. The weight of this SSD is 0.03 lbs.
Turning the Corsair MP600 Core XT NVMe SSD 2TB over reveals a label placed on the PCB that contains lots of regulatory certification logos along with the branding and model name. Furthermore, the label contains the part number, capacity size, and serial number. Other than that, there are no components of note on the backside of the MP600 Core XT 2TB. This drive is manufactured in Taiwan.
Upon closer inspection, we can see some key components on the Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB. We see a Phison controller with the label "PSS021-ES1-46". Although this is not apparent at first, this is the Phison PS5021-E21T controller. As a cost-saving method, there is no DRAM for this controller. Generally, DRAM on SSDs is utilized to write data to the drive as a cache. A table is stored that maps the physical logical block addresses located on the NAND flash memory. DRAM IC chips are not cheap though, so it is not uncommon for budget drives to keep these out. This does come at a cost of performance, as DRAM-less SSDs will store this mapping data directly on the NAND flash or your computer's RAM via something called the Host Memory Buffer, which is quite a bit slower than onboard DRAM. In the case of the Corsair MP600 Core XT, it uses an HMB to compensate for the lack of DRAM.
The Corsair MP600 Core XT NAND flash memory contains the label "IA7HG96AZA". These are Micron-manufactured 176-layer quad level cell chips. There are a total of four NAND flash memory chips on this drive. The rated write endurance is rather low at 450TBW, which equates to about 246GB per day for five years. This is a fair bit lower than other budget drives like the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB and Crucial P5 Plus 1TB at 600TBW. The XPG Atom 50 1TB is rated even higher at 650TBW, and these are just the pure magnitudes, with all these models having half of the capacity of the MP600 Core XT 2TB. On a per-TB level, the MP600 Core XT is comparable to the Crucial P3 Plus 1TB. 48GB out of the 2048GB total capacity, or about 3%, of the drive was used for controller overhead. The actual usable space is 2TB, as advertised. You will see 1.81TB in Windows. The average power consumption is specified at 4.3W.
At 5000MB/s read and 4400MB/s write, these are modest numbers over the PCIe 4.0 interface, but this is a budget drive. To see how these specifications play out in our tests, we will pit the Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB against other PCIe 4.0-based NVMe drives from other major manufacturers.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
CPU Cooling: DeepCool LT720
Motherboard: MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk
RAM: Thermaltake TOUGHRAM XG RGB DDR4-4000 2x8GB
Graphics: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 TI
Chassis: Corsair 5000D
Power: SilverStone Decathlon DA850 Gold 850W
Storage: Samsung EVO 970 1TB, Lexar NQ100 480GB
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB
- ADATA Legend 960 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 4TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB
- Patriot P400 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
- XPG Atom 50 1TB
- XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
