Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Corsair MP600 Elite 2TB is the largest capacity variant in the company's mainstream PCIe 4.0-based NVMe SSD lineup. This slots above the MP600 Core XT 2TB, but below the MP600 Pro XT and PCIe 5.0-based MP700 series. The MP600 Elite we are reviewing today comes with a beefy ventilated aluminum heatsink, shown in our photo above. As beefy as it is, it is still PlayStation 5-compatible, since the drive and heatsink is below 11.25mm at 9mm. You can buy one without a heatsink, which will instead depend on the heatsink that comes with your motherboard to prevent thermal throttling, Otherwise, whether you buy one with or without a heatsink from the factory, they are both electrically the exact same drive under the hood.
The Corsair MP600 Elite 2TB is an M.2 2280 format SSD. If you are not familiar with the M.2 physical standard, M.2 2280 means the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm, hence its numerical designation. Its components are located on the black printed circuit board located behind the heatsink, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. The Corsair MP600 Elite 2TB works on the NVMe 1.4 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 4.0. The MP600 uses four lanes for up to 8000MB/s bandwidth in each direction.
Flipping the Corsair MP600 Elite 2TB around and you will see the back of the wraparound heatsink. The labels on this side of the Corsair MP600 Elite SSD carry miscellaneous information such as its part number, capacity, serial number, and regulatory certifications. This SSD is made in Taiwan, which is the same as the MP600 Core XT 2TB.
You can see what the Corsair MP600 Elite 2TB is made from after removing the heatsink. There are three chips that can be seen, all located on the same side. At the heart of Corsair's MP600 Elite 2TB is a Phison PS5027-E27 controller, as opposed to the PS5021-E21T found on the MP600 Core XT. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to utilize the bandwidth afforded by the PCIe 4.0 standard. The controller also has native full drive encryption support. To save cost, no DRAM is available to the controller for system memory. Just for background, SSD DRAM is used as a cache for writing data to the drive and storing a table that maps where each logical block address is physically located on the NAND flash memory. However, DRAM chips are not cheap even if you only need 1GB of DRAM per 1TB of storage, so budget SSDs often omit it to cut cost. Instead, DRAM-less SSDs store the mapping data on the NAND flash itself, which affects performance, as flash memory is orders of magnitudes slower than DRAM. To compensate, the NVMe interface supports something called the Host Memory Buffer, which allows the use of some of your computer's RAM to cache the mapping data. This is not as fast as an SSD having its own DRAM, but still much faster than the SSD's NAND flash memory.
The Corsair MP600 Elite's flash memory are Toshiba-branded 162-layer BiCS6 triple-level cells in two chips labeled T2BIGA5A1V. Its rated write endurance is an excellent 1200TBW, which equates to about 660GB per day for five years. This is significantly better than the MP600 Core XT 2TB at 450TBW and on par with the likes of the Crucial P5 Plus 2TB and T500 2TB, but much lower on a per-TB level than performance drives like the Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB at 1000TBW and Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB at 2000TBW. Its rated power consumption is <5mW idle, 5.7W active read, and 5.7W active write. 96GB out of the 2048GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 2TB, as advertised. You will see 1.81TB in Windows.
Specified at 7000MB/s read, 6500MB/s write, up to 1,000,000 IOPS read, and up to 1,200,000 IOPS write over NVMe 1.4 on PCIe 4.0 x4, these figures are impressive for a mainstream model. It is about one-and-a-half to twice as fast as previous generation PCIe 3.0-based drives. To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the MP600 Elite 2TB against the big boys of this game to see how this mainstream PCIe 4.0-based drive from Corsair steps up against some popular NVMe SSDs from manufacturers like ADATA/XPG, Crucial, Kingston, Lexar, Patriot, Western Digital, and even Corsair themselves in the next seven pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i7-12700K
Motherboard: ASUS ProArt B660-Creator D4
RAM: Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3600 4x32GB
Graphics: ASUS Dual GeForce GTX 1060 3GB
Chassis: NZXT H710i
Storage: Kingston KC3000 1TB, Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
Power: Seasonic PRIME Ultra Titanium 850W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Corsair MP600 Elite 2TB
- ADATA Legend 960 1TB
- Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 4TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 2TB (Heatsink Version)
- Crucial T500 2TB
- Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Lexar NM710 1TB
- Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB
- Netac NV7000-t 1TB
- 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
