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Corsair was one of the early birds to market with a PCIe Gen 5 drive in the shape of the MP700. Now we have the next chapter in the story, the MP700 PRO, offering faster performance than the original MP700. We test the 2TB model, priced at £335 here in the UK.
At launch the MP700 PRO comes in just two capacities; 1TB and 2TB but in three versions, a plain drive, air-cooled (Corsair kindly provided the 2TB version to us for review) and one with a waterblock fitted (2TB version only at time of writing). The drive uses a combination of Phison's PS5026-E26 8-channel controller and 232-layer Micron TLC NAND and there's also 4GB of DRAM (DDR4-4266) cache.
Officially the 2TB drive is rated as up to 12,400MB/s and 11,800MB/s for Sequential read & writes respectively while the 1TB drive has figures of up to 11,700MB/s for reads and up to 9.600MB/s for writes.
Random performance for the 2TB drive is quoted as up to 1,500,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,600,000 IOPS for writes. The 1TB drive is slower at up to 1,400,000 IOPS (reads) and up to 1,500,000 IOPS (writes).
Corsair gives power consumption figures for the drives as up to 11W for the 1TB drive and 11.5W for the 2TB for average active read/writes. Endurance for the drives is quoted as 700TBW for the 1TB drive and 1400TBW for the 2TB model. Corsair backs the drive with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 2TB.
- NAND Components: 232-layer Micron B58R TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Phison PS5026-E26.
- Cache: 4GB DDR4-4266MHz.
- Interface: PCI-e Gen5 x 4, NVMe 2.0.
- Form Factor: M.2, 2280.
- Dimensions: 80 x 24 x 30mm.
- Drive Weight: 97g.
Firmware Version: EQFM22.1
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 and 4K performance as well as the drive’s capacity. The rear of the box has multilingual information about the drive's performance. There is also a drawing of the drive showing its dimensions as well as the length of the power cable for the fan.
The drive and fan power cable are kept safe and secure by the snug fitting box insert.
The drive Corsair supplied for review was the version with active air cooling. The aluminium heatsink is well constructed and is quite a weighty number (97g), while adding around 28mm to the height and 4mm or-so to the width of the drive. The heatsink is built in two halves, the heatsink itself and a tray that the drive sits in. The two parts are joined together by four very small screws.
The drive uses a SATA connector to supply power to the cooling fan.
The heatsink has a tiny fan built into one end of it.
The MP700 PRO is built on a dual-sided format. One side of the PCB holds the Phison PS5026-E26 8-channel controller, a single 4GB DDR4-4266 cache IC (SK hynix H9HCNNNCPUML) and two 512GB packages of 232-layer Micron B58R TLC NAND. The other side of the PCB holds another pair of NAND packages.
Phison's PS5026-E26 is the first consumer Gen5 controller. Built on a 12nm process supporting up to 32TB of TLC or QLC NAND flash memory with data transfer speeds of up to 2400 MT/s. The controller uses dual Arm Cortex-R5 cores that work together with Phison’s specialized accelerators from its CoXProcessor 2.0 family. The controller supports Phison's 5th Generation LDPC ECC engine.
Corsair’s SSD management utility is called SSD Toolbox. It's not the funkiest-looking GUI we've ever seen and could do with a bit of a refresh after all these years, but having said that, it does provide 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 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
Crucial T700 2TB
Crucial T700 with Heatsink 2TB
Gigabyte AORUS 10000 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.
In CrystalDiskMark 8's 4K QD1 T1 test, the Corsair MP700 PRO splits the two versions of Crucial's T700 drive. It has a slightly faster read speed than the plain T700 but has a little slower write speed than both the Crucial drives.
As you can see from the benchmark result screens we can confirm the official Sequential read/write figures for the 2TB MP700 PRO of 12,400MB/s and 11,800MB/s respectively, with a best test read result of 12,397MB/s with writes at 11,821MB/s.
Those Sequential scores see the drive sitting in third place in the results chart just behind the two versions of Crucial's T700 drive but in truth, there is nothing much between all three drives in terms of Sequential performance in the default CrystalDiskMark 8 test.
Peak Performance profile.
With the Peak Performance profile could once again confirm the official Sequential performance figures with the drive slipping into third place behind the two Crucial drives.
Using the Peak Performance profile of the CrystalDiskMark benchmark we could confirm the official 4K random read/write figures for the drive of up to 1,500,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,600,000 IOPS for writes and even bettered them a fraction with read/write test results of 1,567,072 IOPS and 1,623,311 IOPS respectively. That read IOPS figure is good enough for the second spot on the chart, but its write performance isn't as good as the two Crucial T700 drives it splits.
Real World profile.
Corsair's MP700 PRO sits in third place in the Real World Profile chart with Sequential read/write scores of 9.389MB/s and 9,929MB/s respectively.
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 quite get to the official maximum Sequential figures of up to 12,400MB/s and 11,800MB/s for reads and writes respectively for the MP700 PRO. The best we saw from the drive under testing was 11,006MB/s for reads and 11,003MB/s for writes.
Using the ATTO benchmark, the MP700 PRO write performance peaked at the 256KB mark at 11,003MB/s and plateaued at that point for the rest of the test up to an I/O size of 8MB. The read performance levelled off between the 256KB and 512KB points but then got a second wind, ending up at 11,530MB/s at the 8MB mark.
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 AS SSD benchmark read score of 4760 sees the 2TB Corsair MP700 PRO sitting in third place but it does have a much better write score than the two drives sitting above it.
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.
Using these tests we can confirm the official maximum Sequential write figure of 11,800MB/s with a test result of 11,807MB/s. Reads came in a little shy of the official maximum of 12,400MB/s at 12,285MB/s.
Sequential Read Performance v QD compared
At QD1, the Corsair MP700 PRO sits at the bottom of the table for Sequential reads by a tiny margin. However, by QD2 and beyond it has moved into second place behind the standard version of Crucial's T700 drive.
Sequential Write Performance v QD Compared
As with the Sequential read result, at QD1 the drive sits at the bottom of the Sequential write results table. However, by QD2 it sits in mid-table and at QD's 4 and 32 it sits atop of the table.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random read 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.
Our four-threaded 4K random read tests couldn't get close to the official maximum of 1,500K IOPS. The best figure we saw was 517,821 IOPS (2,121MB/s) at the end of the test run at QD32.
4K Random Read v QD performance compared
At QD1 the drive sits in third place behind both Crucial T700 drives. The drive moves up a position at QD2 and drops back again at QD4. However, at QD32, the MP700 PRO is the fastest consumer drive we've seen to date in this test.
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 with our four threaded random write tests, we couldn't get close to the official maximum of 1,500K IOPS. The best we saw from testing was 451,618 IOPS (1,849MB/s) at QD32.
4K Random Write v QD performance compared
Unlike the random read results, when it comes to random writes, the drive stays in the bottom spot for all the tested queue depths.
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 the four threaded 4K 70/30 read/write tests, the performance of the 2TB Corsair MP700 PRO ranges from 108,541 IOPS (444MB/s) at QD1 to 495,635 IOPS (2,030MB/s) at QD32. With a single thread, the test results range from 26,555 IOPS (108.77MB/s) at QD1 up to 174,496 IOPS (714.735MB/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 random read tests, all four of the tested threads displayed smooth increases in performance as the queue depth deepened with no nasty surprises. At QD1 the performance ranges from 21,101 IOPS (86.43MB/s) using a single thread up to 84,754 IOPS (347.15MB/s) using four threads. At QD8 performance ranges from 160,869 IOPS (658.92MB/s) with a single thread up to 502,760 IOPS (2,059MB/s) with four.
Random Writes
In the 4K write tests the performance rose sharply from QD1 to QD2 for all four tested threads with the fastest rises seen in the three and four-threaded tests. However, all four threads saw the performance levelling off from QD4 until the end of the test at QD8.
In our read-throughput tests, the performance of the Corsair MP700 PRO climbed smoothly through the block marks until it reached the 1MB block where the performance dropped from 8,027MB/s to 6,769MB/s at the 2MB mark before recovering to finish the test run peaking at 8,519MB/s, which is some way off the official maximum rating of 12,400MB/s.
Although nowhere close to the official Sequential figure, the test result of 8,519MB/s sees the drive slip into third place in our results chart, behind both Crucial T700 drives.
During the write test run, the performance of the MP700 PRO momentarily levels off at a couple of places; between blocks 128KB and 256KB and 512KB and 1MB. The drive recovered well from both occasions, finishing the test run at 10,740.02MB/s.
As with the read throughput test result, the peak write result of 10,740.02MB/s is short of the official maximum of 11,800MB/s but it is closer to the official figure than the read result.
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 the 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).
The 2TB MP700 PRO averaged 324MB/s for the six Adobe startup traces, the fastest being Premiere Pro at 396MB/s. The fastest of the five Adobe usage traces was the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace at 1,473MB/s. Including this one, the drive averaged 681MB/s for the five tests.
The 2TB MP700 PRO averaged 1,059MB/s for the three gaming tests, the fastest being Battlefield V trace at 1,411MB/s. When it came to the file transfers, the fastest was the cp1 Write test at 6,902MB/s. The drive averaged 3,840MB/s overall for the six file transfer tests.
With an overall bandwidth figure of 761MB/s, the Corsair MP700 PRO slots into the third spot on the results chart but there isn't much to choose between the top three.
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 2TB Corsair MP700 PRO had an average game loading bandwidth figure for the three games of 1,116MB/s with an average access time of 47.6µs.
In the game moving, recording, installing and saving test traces the drive averaged 1,606.17MB/s with an average access time of 33µs for the four tests.
The 2TB MP700 PRO averaged 824.3MB/s for the benchmark run.
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.
The Corsair MP700 PRO does pretty well in the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark. It doesn't top any of the load results charts and even sits bottom of the Scene 1 and Scene 5 charts but still manages to end up in third place overall for the complete benchmark run.
We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs.
Corsair's MP700 PRO not only has a chunky aluminium heatsink but for extra cooling, one end of the heatsink has a tiny fan built into it and the combination works well. During our benchmarking runs, the hottest the drive got was 53° C during the CrystalDiskMark 8 default write test. The drive has a maximum operating temperature of 70°C and should the temperature exceed 76°C then thermal throttling will be triggered. For the non-4K tests the drive averaged 43.31°C
For the 4K-based tests, the MP700 PRO averaged 37.57°C.
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 drive reading from & writing to a 2TB Kingston KC3000.
Transfer Details
Windows 10 backup – 118GB.
Data file – 100GB.
BluRay Movie – 42GB.
Windows 11 iso – 5.4GB.
File folder – 50GB – 28,523 files.
Steam folder – 222GB (8 games: Alien Isolation, Battlefield 4, BioShock Infinite, Crysis 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Shadow Of Mordor, Skyrim, The Witcher3 Wild Hunt).
Movie demos 8K – 21GB – (11 demos).
Raw Movie Clips 4K – 16GB – (9 MP4V files).
Movie folder – 12GB – 15 files – (8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
Photo Folder – 10GB – 304 files – (171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
Audio Folder – 10GB – 1,483 files – (1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
Single large image – 5GB – 1.5bn pixel photo.
3D Printer File Folder – 4.25GB – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
AutoCAD File Folder – 1.5GB (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).
The drive averaged 2,282.21MB/s when writing the 14 transfer tests with the fastest being the 7,151MB/s for the 100GB Data file transfer and the slowest being the 235MB/s for the 10GB Photo folder. Reading back the data the average was 4,994MB/s. The fastest being Windows 11 iso at 5,832MB/s.The drive averaged 2,282.21MB/s when writing the 14 transfer tests with the fastest being the 7,151MB/s for the 100GB Data file transfer and the slowest being the 235MB/s for the 10GB Photo folder. Reading back the data the average was 4,994MB/s. The fastest being the Windows 11 iso transfer at 5,832MB/s.
Corsair were among the first wave of companies to launch a retail PCIe Gen 5 drive in the market, in the shape of the MP700. Now comes the next take on the concept, the MP700 PRO, which offers faster performance than the original MP700. Corsair rated the 2TB MP700 at up to 10,000MB/s for both reads and writes whereas the 2TB PRO version is rated at up to 12,400MB/s for reads and up to 11,800MB/s for writes.
At launch, just two drives make up the PRO product line, a 1TB entry model and a 2TB flagship (the model Corsair sent us for review). Corsair offers the drives in three versions, standard (1TB & 2TB), active air cooled (1TB & 2TB) and a water block version, 2TB only. The MP700 PRO uses a combination of Phsion's S5026-E26 controller and 232-Layer Micron B58R TLC NAND. Phsion's S5026-E26 supports eight NAND channels at transfer speeds up to 2,400 MT/s. The controller also provides the AES 256-bit encryption that Corsair has enabled on the drive.
As well as the previously mentioned Sequential speeds, the 2TB MP700 PRO is rated up to 1,500,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,600,000 IOPS for writes for 4K random performance. The 1TB drive Sequential performance is rated as up to 11,700MB/s for reads and up to 9.600MB/s for writes. Random performance is quoted as up to 1,400,000 IOPS and up to 1,500,000 IOPS for read and writes respectively.
Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite get to the maximum Sequential figures with test results of 11,006MB/s for reads and 11,003MB/s for writes. However, using the default CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could confirm the official Sequential figures with test results of 12,397MB/s for reads and 11,821MB/s for writes.
As for random performance, using our four threaded tests we could get nowhere near the official 1,500,000 IOPS for read and 1,600,000 IOPS for writes with test results of 451,618 IOPS for reads with writes at 495,635 IOPS. However, switching over to the Peak Performance profile settings in CrystalDiskMark 8 we could confirm the official write figure with a test result of 1,623,311 IOPS. The read result of 1,567,072 IOPS didn't quite hit the official maximum but it's not too far away.
Corsair offers the drive with two integrated cooling options (the basic drive you'll need some form of motherboard cooling for), active air-cooling and a water block for liquid cooling. The active air cooling solution uses a well-made aluminium heatsink with a very small fan (the fan uses a SATA power connector) built into one end. The combination works well as the hottest we saw the drive get was 53° C during the CrystalDiskMark 8 default write test. The drive has been designed to start throttling back if it goes above 76° C.
We found the 2TB Corsair MP700 PRO on the Corsair website for £334.99 (inc VAT) HERE.
Pros
- Extremely fast Sequential performance.
- PCIe 5.0 interface.
- Well-designed heatsink.
Cons
- Needs a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot to get the best out of it.
- A little pricey.
KitGuru says: Corsair's MP700 PRO offers a step up in speed from the original MP700 and is available with a choice of three cooling options – none, active air and water block – so there is an option for most. But you do have to shell out around 20 quid extra for the two cooler-equipped drives over the standard model.
