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Corsair recently sent us their latest release of the MP700 Elite Gen 5 SSD and, as I pretty much always do, I threw it in for some tests knowing nothing about it. Within minutes I was regarding this as potentially one of my favorite SSDs and I still hadn’t looked at any specs. Take a look at this Crystal Diskmark result and understand that this software is commonly used by companies to determine listed specifications… such as the high sequential read and writes…
Listed specs for this SSD are 10GB/s read and 8.5GB/s write so all is in order there…but that is not what we typically look at. The reasoning for such is these ‘high sequential’ numbers are no more than a industry standardized sales pitch and your computer will never transfer data at these listed speeds…true fact. It is a representation of what the SSD is capable of however, much like buying a sports car. That Corvette Z06 may have a top speed of 195 mph (313Km/h) but you will never hit that; but boy it sure can move!
The true gold of the above benchmark, and the thing that makes reviewers drool, is the low 4K random reads and writes that are circled in red. Any SSD that hits the bench with 100+ MB/s reads and 400+ MB/s writes is truly a rare and welcome addition to the industry. The bread and butter of our computers is the speeds in which they function and move data. Even gamers thrive on scene transition times and the faster things move, the better the overall package. Computers succeed or fail on the movement of low 4K files as do gamers; this means the difference in microseconds that results in a win or loss. These numbers are truly encouraging for any storage media. This brings us back to the Corsair MP700 Elite Gen 5 NVMe SSD.
On our bench today is the Corsair MP700 Elite Gen 5 NVMe SSD with heatsink and it is available with or without. This is a PCIe 5.0 x4 (4-lane) SSD that is available in one and two terabyte versions and utilizes the latest NVM Express 2.0 protocol. It is a 2280 form factor SSD which means it is 22mm wide by 80 mm long and its listed specifications, as mentioned, are 10000MB/s read and 8500MB/s write, as well as up to 1.3K read and 1.4K write IOPS.
This is where things get interesting. Remember how we mentioned that we had tested this SSD without looking at the specs? In disassembling the heatsink we learn that this is a single sided SSD. Being a single sided SSD, this most probably meant that it was a DRAMless SSD which we would never expect to provide such performance.
The Corsair MP700 Elite Gen 5 SSD is comprised of the Phison E31T NVMe DRAMless Gen 5 4-channel SSD controller on the far right which is one of the first of its kind to be of the 7nm process, meaning this controller is of a smaller footprint than most others. Paired with this are two pieces of KIOXIA 218-layer 3D BiCS 8 TLC NAND flash memory, each being 8-die packages with an unformatted capacity of 1TB per. There is in fact no DRAM chip on this SSD which makes that performance so special.
MSRP pricing for the MP700 Elite is $149.99 for the 1TB and $249.99 for the 2TB version, although they are a bit cheaper on Amazon at the time of this report. The MP700 Elite is Microsoft DirectStorage compatible which allows for much quicker game loading times through GPU decompression, bypassing CPU resources and allowing for faster loading of large game files. It also speaks to 600TBW (Terabytes Written) endurance for the 1TB version which doubles for the 2TB we are testing today. This SSD is supported by a 5-year limited warranty as well as the free Corsair SSD Toolbox which can be downloaded here.
Let’s check out the performance…