Corsair MP600 Elite with Heatsink 2TB Review

Corsair's MP600 drive range is the company's Gen 4 x4 product line which has quite a few different models in it already. The latest addition to the range is the MP600 Elite, which uses a combination of a Phison controller and BiCS6 162-layer TLC NAND.

At launch, the MP600 range is made up of just two capacities, 1TB and 2TB, but Corsair is planning to launch a 4TB flagship drive in April '24.  The MP600 is available in three different versions; standard (MP600ENH), factory-fitted heatsink (MP600EHS, the drive Corsair kindly sent in for review) and a PS-5 compatible model (MP600ECS).

The MP600 Elite uses a Phison PS5027-E27T controller and is the first drive we've seen using this chip. The PS5027-E27T is Phison's latest Gen 4 DRAM-less design controller supporting Sequential read/write speeds of up to 7,400MB/s and 6,700MB/s respectively. Built on a 12nm TSMC process the 4-channel controller uses single-CPU architecture (built-in ARM 32-bit Cortex-R5) and supports up to 8TB of both TLC or QLC NAND (Toggle 5.0 and ONFi 5.0 compliant) with transfer rates of up to 3600MT/s. Data reliability is provided by Phison's 5th-generation LDPC ECC engine.

Corsair rates the Sequential performance of the 2TB MP600 Elite with Heatsink as up to 7,000MB/s and up to 6,500MB/s for reads and writes respectively. Incidentally, the 1TB drive has the same read figure but with a write rating of 6,200MB/s. Testing the drive with the ATTO benchmark we couldn't hit the official maximums for the drive with a read result of 6,900MB/s which is in the ballpark of the official figure but writes at 5,050MB/s were much further away. We could however confirm both figures using the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark with a read result of 7,387MB/s and a write figure of 6,583MB/s.

4K random performance is officially quoted as up to 1,000,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,200,000 IOPS for writes for the 2TB drive. Using the Peak Performance profile of CrystalDiskMark 8 we could confirm both of the official figures with a read test result of 1,018,212 IOPS with writes at 1,476,983 IOPS.

The factory-fitted heatsink adds around 2mm to the width of the drive and 7mm to the height so it's not a massive chunk of aluminium like some coolers we've seen. It works pretty well and kept the drive cool under testing without any signs of thermal throttling during our test runs.

The heatsink version of the drive costs only around eight quid more than the plain drive so it's a bit of a no-brainer to go for the heatsink drive.

We found the 2TB Corsair MP600 Elite with Heatsink on Overclockers UK for £162.95 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• Overall performance.
• Heatsink design.
• Endurance.

Cons

• DRAM-less design.
• Price could do with a bit of tinkering.

KitGuru says: Corsair's latest member of the MP600 series offers good all-round performance and the heatsink keeps the drive safe when under load, but it is in a highly competitive market segment with faster drives around the same price point so a little bit of adjustment with the price would help it.

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