Corsair Force MP600 1TB SSD Review

PCIe Gen4 SSD's are slowly trickling into the market place and Corsair is one of the first out of the gate with the Force MP600 drive. At the heart of the Force MP600 is one of Phison’s PS5016-E16 controller’s, the world’s first PCIe Gen4 x4 controller (and at the time of writing, the only Gen4 controller).

The 8-channel controller looks after, in the case of the 1TB drive, four packages of Toshiba's latest BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. There is also 1GB of DDR-2400 cache.

Official Sequential figures for the 1TB drive are up to an impressive 4,950MB/s and 4,250MB/s for read and writes respectively. Using the ATTO 3.5 benchmark we couldn’t quite match that read figure with the review drive producing a figure of 4,717MB/s. However, the tested write result of 4,418MB/s was some 168MB/s faster than the official write figure. With our own Sequential tests, we could better both official figures, the drive producing figures of 5,024.08MB/s (QD32) and 4,324.88MB/s (QD16) for read and writes respectively.

In terms of random 4K performance, the official performance figures are up to 680,000 IOPS for reads and 600,000 IOPS for writes. With our 4 threaded tests, we couldn’t get close to those maximums with the drive. The fastest speeds we saw using our own 4K tests were 370,900 IOPS (QD32) for reads and 174,920 IOPS (QD8) for writes.

We then tested the drive, again at a QD of 32 but this time with 8 threads and got a read figure of 551,626 IOPS with writes at 481,324 IOPS, still far short of the official maximum figures. The closest we came to the official maximums was with the Peak Performance profile test in CrystalDiskMark 7 which produced a read figure of 635,500 IOPS with writes at 561,841 IOPS.

To prevent the drive from overheating when dealing with heavy workloads it uses a well-designed aluminium heatsink. If you have a motherboard which has its own cooling system for M.2 drives, no problem, as the heatsink can be easily removed from the drive, just by releasing four clips, a nice touch that.

It's a very quick drive that, thanks to its hefty heatsink, looks the part, but to get the full benefit of all that performance offered by the PCIe 4.0 interface you need to install it in a motherboard supporting a combination of an X570 chipset and an AMD Ryzen 3000 series processor. Installing it in any other motherboard will see it working at PCIe Gen3 x4.

We found the 1TB Corsair Force MP600 for £218.99 (inc VAT) on Overclockers UK HERE

Pros

• PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD.
• Sequential performance.
• Well designed heatsink.
  Endurance.

Cons

• Needs a X570/Ryzen 3000 combination to get the full benefit of the technology.
• Tested 4K performance couldn’t match the official maximum figures.
• Pricey.

Kitguru says: Thanks to its PCIe Gen4.0 x4 interface, the Force MP600 is currently the fastest drive in Corsair's SSD inventory with very quick Sequential read/write speeds. The only fly in the ointment is that it does need the latest AMD hardware to do it.

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