Corsair MP600 GS 2TB SSD Review

The GS is the latest drive to join Corsair's MP600 family of drives. Whereas the other MP600 drives are aimed at the higher end of the market space, the GS has been designed to offer a better balance of performance and endurance at a more competitive price point. To this end, it uses a DRAMless design of four-channel controller whereas all the other MP600 drives use eight-channel controllers. At the time of writing, the MP600 GS comes in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities

The controller in question is Phison's latest entry-level Gen4 controller, the Phison PS5021-E21T. The Phison PS5021-E21T uses single CPU architecture built on a 12nm process, supports the NVMe 1.4 specification and has a transfer rate of 1600MT/s. Corsair has combined the controller with 176-layer B47R 3D TLC NAND in the MP600 GS.

Officially the maximum Sequential read/write performance figures for the 2TB version of the MP600 GS are up to 4,800MB/s for reads and up to 4,500MB/s for writes. Incidentally, that read speed is the same for all three drives. The 500GB drive is rated as up to 3,500MB/s and the 1TB model, 3,900MB/s for Sequential writes. Using the default CrystalDiskMark 8 test we could not only confirm those figures but we coaxed a bit more out of the drive with test results of 4,981MB/s for reads and 4,794MB/s for writes.

As for 4K random performance, the 2TB MP600 is rated up to 530K IOPS for reads and up to 1000K IOPS for writes. Using our four threaded tests we couldn't get close to those figures using our standard four-threaded tests, the best figures we saw were 360,398 IOPS for reads and 255,006 IOPS for writes. However, using the default Peak Performance profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 gave results of 615,646 IOPS for reads, confirming and even bettering the official figure while the 506,057 IOPS figure for writes was nowhere near the official maximum speed.

The Corsair MP600 GS doesn't come with any sort of heatsink preinstalled and to be honest with just a four-channel controller it shouldn't really need one even though it's a Gen 4 drive. Even when pushed hard during testing, the nearest it got to its upper limit of 70°C was just 51°C.

We found the 2TB version of Corsair's MP600 GS for £169.99 (in VAT) direct from Corsair HERE.

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Pros

• 176-layer NAND technology.
• Sequential performance.
• 5-year warranty.

Cons

• Couldn’t match the official random write figures under testing.
• DRAMless design.
• The price needs to come down a little.

KitGuru says: Corsair's MP600 GS is pitched at a highly competitive market segment and while they have given it every chance with keen pricing, a bit more tweaking of the price tag wouldn't go amiss as there are some faster drives out there that are very close to its price point.

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