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We recently looked at Phison's reference design for the new PS5031-E31T Gen 5 controller (HERE) and now we can present our review of one of the first retail SSDs powered by the new IC, the Corsair MP700 Elite with Heatsink. We analyse the 2TB model, currently priced at at £230 in the UK.
At launch, Corsair's MP700 Elite comes in just two capacities, 1TB and 2TB and in two versions, plain or with a factory-fitted heatsink, which is the version Corsair sent us for review. The new drive is built around Phison's latest Gen5 controller, the PS5031-E31T. The new controller has been designed with the mainstream market in mind, bringing a 4-channel, DRAM-less design to the Gen5 market segment. For the MP700 Elite, the controller is looking after Kioxia BiCS8 218-layer 3D TLC NAND.
Corsair quotes sequential performance figures for both capacities of the MP700 Elite as up to 10,000MB/s and up to 8,500MB/s for reads and writes respectively. Random performance is listed as up to 1,300,000 IOPS for reads with writes at up to 1,400,000 IOPS.
Corsair gives power consumption figures for the MP700 Elite as up to 5.9W for average active reads and writes. Endurance for the drives is quoted as 1,200TBW for the 2TB models and 600TBW for the 1TB range. Corsair backs the drive with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 2TB
- NAND Components: Kioxia BiCS8 218-layer 3D TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Phison PS5031-E31T.
- Cache: None, HMB technology.
- Interface: PCIe Gen5.0 x4, NVMe 2.0.
- Form Factor: M.2 2280.
- Dimensions: 24 x 80 x 9mm.
- Drive Weight: 55g.
Firmware Version: EVTM00.0
The drive comes in a compact box with a clear image of the drive on the front. Under the image is a strip label with performance figures for sequential reads and writes along with the drive’s capacity. The rear of the box has multilingual information about the drive's performance and there is a logo signifying the 5-year warranty Corsair backs the drive with.
The heatsink-equipped version of the MP700 Elite uses a two-part heat sink. The heatsink itself is constructed from aluminium and has a rough feeling finish. This sits on top of the drive in a cradle with four tiny screws joining the two parts together. There are thermal pads under the heatsink for the NAND and the controller. There are also pads in the cradle and they were so reluctant to release their grip on the drive that we gave up trying just in case something nasty happened to the drive. The heatsink adds 2mm to the width, and 7mm to the height to the basic drive.
The drive is a single-sided design with all the components on one side of the PCB.
The major components of the drive consist of a Phison PS5031-E31T controller and two 1TB (8 1Tb dies) packages of Kioxia BiCS8 218-layer 3D TLC NAND sit on one side of the PCB.
Phison's PS5031-E31T is the company's second consumer Gen5 controller and is aimed at the mainstream end of the market rather than the high-end/enthusiastic market segment that the previous PS5026-E26 occupied. Unlike the 12nm process that the PS5026-E26 uses. the PS5031-E31T uses a 7nm process which brings with it better efficiency and even more importantly less heat generation. The E31T is a four-channel DRAM-less design (uses HMB technology instead of a dedicated DRAM IC) supporting up to 8TB of TLC or QLC NAND flash memory with data transfer speeds of up to 3600 MT/s.
Corsair’s SSD management utility is called SSD Toolbox. It's not the funkiest-looking GUI we've ever seen but having said that, it does give all you really need to keep an eye on the drive. It provides drive information and S.M.A.R.T details and also supports firmware updates, secure wiping of the drive, drive optimisation and usefully incorporates a disk cloning utility.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, 32GB DDR5-6000, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 and a Gigabyte AORUS X670E Xtreme motherboard.
Other drives
ADATA Legend 970 2TB
Corsair MP700 PRO SE 4TB
Corsair MP700 PRO 2TB
Crucial T705 2TB
Crucial T700 2TB
Crucial T700 with Heatsink 2TB
Gigabyte AORUS 10000 2TB
Klevv Genuine G360 2TB
Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark 4.
CrystalMark 8.0.0.
AS SSD 2.0.
IOMeter.
UL Solutions PC Mark 10.
UL Solutions 3DMark Storage Benchmark.
Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark.
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure the theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using v8.0.
Corsair's MP700 Elite with Heatsink 2TB performs well in the CrystalDiskMark 8 4K QD1 T1 test, with a very good read score of 89.41MB/s but the thing that stands out is the write result of 346.43MB/s which is just shy of the fastest write performance we've seen in this test to date, which was from the reference Phison E31T drive.
As you can see from the benchmarking screens we can confirm the official sequential ratings of the drive of up to 10,000MB/s for reads and up to 8,500MB/s for writes and better them a little with default test figures of 10,391.10MB/s for reads and 8,757.61MB/s for writes.
That 10,391.10MB/s read result sees the MP700 Elite with Heatsink leading a bunch of 10GB/s drives although its write performance is nowhere near as good.
Peak Performance Profile
We can confirm the official random 4K figures for the drive of up to 1,300,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,500,000 IOPS for writes using the Peak Performance profile of CrystalDiskMark 8 with default test results of 1,375,484 IOPS for reads and 1,511,591 IOPS for writes.
Once again we could confirm the official sequential figures with test results of 10,392MB/s for reads and 8,767MB/s for writes.
Real World Profile
The Corsair MP700 Elite with Heatsink sits above the reference design E31T in the CrystalDiskMark 8 Real World result table with a read score of 5,622MB but its write performance at 8,780MB/s is better.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage system performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
We are using version 4.1 for our NVMe disk tests.
Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't hit the official read and write sequential figures of 10,000MB/s and 8,500MB/s for read and writes respectively but with test figures of 9,660MB/s for reads and 8,210MB/s for writes, we got close.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read-and-write tests, as well as random read-and-write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. It uses incompressible data samples which many drives struggle with, so results can be viewed as the worst-case scenarios. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
The Corsair MP700 Elite with Heatsink sits just above the reference Phison E31T with its read score of 3582 however, the reference design has a better write score.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the sequential read and write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
128KB sequential Read / Write.
Transfer Request Size: 128KB, Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
In this test, the test results confirmed the official sequential ratings of the drive of up to 10,000MB/s and 8,500MB/s for read and write respectively with the drive producing figures of 10,738MBs for reads and 8,759MB/s for writes both at QD32.
128KB sequential Read performance compared
At QDs 1 and 2 the drive sits just above the E31T reference design but at QD4 it drops below it. However, at QD32 the drive climbs up the table to lead the way for the 10GB/s drives.
128KB sequential Write performance compared.
When it comes to the sequential write test results the MP700 Elite with Heatsink sits just above the PS5031-E31T reference design through all the tested queue depths.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
Using our 4-threaded test results we couldn't get close to the official maximum random read figure of 1,300,000 IOPS, the best we saw was 537,524 IOPS at QD16 before the performance dropped back to 533,467 IOPS at the end of the test run at QD32.
4K Random Read v QD compared.
At QD1, Corsair's MP700 Elite with Heatsink is the fastest Gen5 consumer drive we've seen to date for this QD with a result figure of 93,560 IOPS. However, at QD2 the drive has dropped to the second spot and by QD4 it's dropped down to the penultimate place in the chart. But at QD32 it stages a major comeback to sit in second place behind the Phison E31T reference design.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
As with the random read results, we couldn't get close to the official maximum of 1,400,000 IOPS using our four threaded tests. The best we saw was 414,777 IOPS at QD16. After this peak, the performance dropped slightly to finish the test run at QD32 at 409,745 IOPS.
4K Random Write v QD compared.
As with the random read result, the QD1 random write performance of the MP700 Elite with Heatsink is very impressive, outperforming all of the high-end drives in this list. Unfortunately, it doesn't maintain this position as once the queue depth deepens the performance of the drive compared to the rest of the Gen 5 drives here drops off and the drive drops to last place on the charts
We used CrystalDiskMark 8’s custom settings to test the 4K 70/30 mixed read/write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths using a single thread and four threads.
Using a single thread the MP700 Elite with Heatsink produced results that ranged from 27,795 IOPS (113.85MB/s) at QD1 up to a peak of 176,537 IOPS (723.09MB/s) at QD16 before dropping back a little to finish the test run at QD32 at 176,109 IOPS (721.34MB/s).
Switching up to four threads the performance goes from 108,721 IOPS (445.32MB/s) at QD1 to a peak of 500,841 IOPS (2,051.44MB/s) at QD16 before dropping back to 499,359 IOPS (2,045.38MB/s) at QD32.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8 to test the random performance of the drive at lower queue depths (QD1 –QD8 where most of the everyday workloads occur) using 1 to 4 threads.
Random Reads
In the QD1-QD8 random read tests the drive produced smooth increases in performance as the queue depth deepened without any noticeable dramas. At QD1 the drive speed ranges from 21,589 IOPS (88.34MB/s) using a single thread up to 93,560 IOPS (383.22MB/s) using four threads. At a QD of 8, the single-thread performance had increased to 157,797 IOPS (646.33MB/s) while the four-threaded test reached 452,495 IOPS (1,853.42MB/s).
Random Writes
In the 4K write tests, the performance rose quickly from QD1 to QD2 for all four tested threads with the fastest rise seen in the three and four-threaded tests. All four threads see the performance start plateauing out from QD2 onwards up to the end of the test run at QD8.
In our read-throughput test, the drive peaked at the 16MB block mark at 7,493.23MB/s, some 2,506MB/s short of the official maximum figure of 10,000MB/s. One thing to notice is that the performance curve of the Corsair MP700 Elite with Heatsink is so much smoother than any other Gen 5 drive tested here.
Although the Corsair drive throughput test result is nowhere near the official rating, it does keep it in touch, more or less, with the majority of the 10GB/s drives on this list.
In the write throughput test the drive peaked at 8,340.55MB/s at the end of the test, which is just 159.45MB/s shy of the official maximum figure for the drive.
Although the drive gets very close to the official sequential write maximum speed it's still only good enough to see the drive in the penultimate spot on the chart.
The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end.
The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run.
Traces used:
Booting Windows 10.
Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable.
Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu.
Overwatch – starting the game until main menu.
Using Adobe After Effects.
Using Microsoft Excel.
Using Adobe Illustrator.
Using Adobe InDesign.
Using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use).
Using Adobe Photoshop (light use).
cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test).
cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test).
cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test).
cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test).
cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).
Corsair's MP700 Elite with Heatsink made a fairly decent job of the PCMark10's Full System Drive Benchmark. It averaged 317MB/s for the six Adobe startup traces, the fastest being 390MB/s for the startup test trace of Premiere Pro, the slowest being the Lightroom startup trace at 249MB/s. Switching over to the Adobe usage traces it averaged 645MB/s for the five tests, with the fastest being the 1,391MB/s for the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace while the slowest was the Adobe InDesign test at 327MB/s.
When it came to the three gaming test traces the drive averaged 554MB/s with the fastest being Battlefield V at 1,068MB/s and the slowest, Overwatch at 517MB/s. Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 was in the middle of these two at 797MB/s. Switching over to the file transfer tests the drive averaged 3,258.83MB/s for the six tests, the fastest of which was the cp1 Write test at 6,131MB/s.
With an overall bandwidth figure of 677.28MB/s, the MP700 with Heatsink sits in last place on the results table.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark uses traces recorded from popular games and gaming-related activities to measure real-world gaming performance.
Traces used –
Battlefield V
Loading Battlefield™ V from launch to the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4
Loading Call of Duty®: Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu.
Overwatch
Loading Overwatch® from launch to the main menu.
Game Move
Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike®: Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive.
Game Recording
Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch®.
Installing Game
Installing The Outer Worlds® from the Epic Games Launcher.
Game Saving
Saving progress in The Outer Worlds game.
In 3DMark’s Storage Test, the MP700 Elite with Heatsink produced an average game loading bandwidth figure for the three games of 832.21MB/s with an average access time of 61µs, which is more or less the same performance as the Phison E31T reference design.
In the game moving, recording, installing and saving test traces the drive averaged 1,426.05MB/s with an average access time of 35µs for the four tests.
The average bandwidth figure for the E31T for the complete benchmark run was 714.51MB/s which puts the drive in a penultimate place in the results table. At first glance, this may seem disappointing but the thing to remember is the rest of the drives in the table are all high-end drives but the technology in the MP700 Elite with Heatsink is aimed at the mainstream segment.
The Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark uses actual maps and playable characters to assign a score to your PC and rate its performance including scene loading times.
The benchmark gives an overall load time as well as loading times by scene.
Corsair's MP700 Elite with Heatsink doesn't appear to handle the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark very well at all, sitting in last place for all of the scene-loading tests.
We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs.
Corsair's MP700 Elite with Heatsink uses Phison's latest Gen5 controller, the PS5031-E31T which has been designed to run cooler than Phison's first Gen5 controller, the mighty E26 and to help enable this the E31T uses a 7nm process. The passive cooler that Corsair has used for the drive isn't as chunky as some we've seen for a Gen 5 drive.
Under benchmarking the hottest the drive got was 42°C when the drive was running the ATTO benchmark which is 28°C off the maximum operating temperature of 70°C. For the majority of the testing, the drive averaged 36.4°C which for a Gen5 drive is very impressive while the 4 K-based tests averaged out at 33°C, another impressive figure.
To test the real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of the drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSD we use the same files but transfer to and from a 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus drive.
Transfer Details
100GB data file.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
10GB Audio folder – (1,483 files – 1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
21GB 8K Movie demos – (11 demos)
16GB 4K Raw Movie Clips – (9 MP4V files).
4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
1.5GB AutoCAD File Folder (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).
The MP700 Elite with Heatsink averaged 4,082MB/s when writing the 8 transfer tests, with the fastest being 7,120MB/s for the 4K Raw Movie Clips folder with the 50GB file folder transfer being the slowest at 578MB/s.
Reading back the data the average was 4,299MB/s and this time around it was the 5GB Photo transfer that was the fastest at 5,930MB/s and again it was the 50GB file folder transfer that was the slowest at 1,283MB/s.
The latest member of Corsair's MP700 range of Gen5 SSDs is the MP700 Elite, a drive that takes the series in a different direction as it's aimed at the mainstream segment rather than the high-end like the other MP700s. Corsair has done this by building the drive around Phison's latest E31T controller. At launch, the MP700 Elite is available in just two capacities, 1TB and 2TB and two versions, plain or with a factory-fitted heatsink.
Corsair sent us a 2TB Heatsink model for this review, though both drives have the same official performance figures. Sequential performance is listed as up to 10,000MB/s for reads and up to 8,500MB/s for writes, while random performance ratings are up to 1.3M IOPS for reads and up to 1.4M IOPS for writes.
Phison brought the world's first Gen5 controller to the market in the form of the PS5026-E26 and now they've produced another world's first in the PS5031-E31T, the first Gen5 controller aimed at the mainstream market segment. Designed to run more efficiently and cooler than the E26, the E31T is built on a 7nm process (the E26 is a 12nm process chip), supports four NAND channels and is a DRAM-less design (another world's first for Gen 5). Be sure to check out our technical preview of the E31T over here.
Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite match Corsair's claimed maximum sequential performance figures but at 9,660MB/s for reads and 8,210MB/s we were certainly in the ballpark with the test results. Switching to the default CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could not only confirm the official maximums, we got a little bit more out of the drive with a read result of 10,391MB/s and writes at 8,757MB/s.
As for random performance, using our four threaded tests we could get nowhere near the official maximums of 1,300,000 IOPS for reads and 1,400,000 IOPS for writes with test results of 537,524 IOPS for reads with writes at 414,777 IOPS. However, switching over to the Peak Performance profile settings in CrystalDiskMark 8 we could confirm the official read /write figures with a default read test result of 1,375,484 IOPS with writes at 1,511, 591IOPS.
The standard MP700 Elite doesn't have any form of heatsink and Phison has claimed that for everyday use the E31T doesn't need a heatsink. The heatsink-equipped version of the MP700 Elite provides that extra layer of protection but the two-piece passive heatsink (heatsink and the cradle that holds the drive) isn't as chunky as we are used to seeing for a Gen 5 drive and it does a very good job. The hottest the drive got when pushed hard was 42°C, which is a very safe distance away from the 70°C maximum operating temperature.
Thanks to the E31T, the 4K QD1 performance of the MP700 Elite is excellent for both reads and writes. Using our 4-threaded 4K tests the drive topped the read chart and was second in the write performance chart, outperforming the high-end drives that make up the tables.
The standard version of the 2TB MP700 Elite is on Corsair's website for £244.99 (inc VAT) and you only pay an extra fiver for the Heatsink version which is pretty good in this day and age.
We found the 2TB Heatsink version of Corsair's MP700 Elite on Scan UK for £229.99 (inc VAT) HERE.
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Pros
- 4K QD1 performance.
- Runs cool for a Gen5 drive.
- Well-designed heatsink.
Cons
- Only two capacities at launch.
- Disappointing write performance in some tests.
- DRAM-less.
KitGuru says: Corsair's MP700 Elite with Heatsink is the first retail drive we've seen using Phison's latest E31T controller and it uses it to good effect. Although it's aimed at the mainstream market it still offers 10,000MB/s / 8,500MB/s sequential read and write performance while running relatively cool for a Gen 5 drive. The price though does need a bit of fettling with to make it a bit more competitive.
