Corsair mp600 review in Spanish (full analysis)

Corsair MP600 was announced during the Computex 2019 event, which we attended and were able to have a first contact with this SSD unit that works under the PCIe 4.0 bus. The boards with AMD X570 chipset and Ryzen 3000 processors will be the stars of this 2019, and undoubtedly the high-performance SSD drives will be the first to take advantage of this bus twice as fast as 3.0. Corsair certifies impressive speeds of 4950 MB / s and 4250 MB / s in sequential read and write and no less than 1000 and 2000 GB of storage capacity. And the unit also includes a high-profile aluminum heatsink.

We are going to review the 2TB drive, which is undoubtedly one of the smallest and most powerful ever built by the manufacturer. But first, we must thank Corsair for the trust they show in us by giving us their product to be able to carry out our analysis.

Corsair MP600 technical characteristics

Unboxing

Corsair was the first of the manufacturers to present this Corsair MP600 in society during Computex 2019, extracting the benefits of a PCIe 4.0 that will be one of the cornerstones of AMD and PCs in the coming years.

But a little less angular is the presentation of this SSD drive, since Corsair has used a small completely white flexible cardboard box with a yellow sticker indicating the manufacturer and the model at hand, although the storage capacity is not specified.. This makes us think that this is not the final presentation of the product, but a bundle made only for analysts.

The opening is at the top, and inside we have a large block of high-density polyethylene foam that is responsible for holding the unit in the central area so that it is not damaged. In principle, the unit does not come fully assembled, so we have the following elements:

Corsair MP600 SSD Aluminum Heatsink Silicone Heated Pad User Instructions

We will not need screws for the installation of the heatsink on the SSD as we will see later, but it will be important to take a look at the instructions because there is something of interest to be able to use the SSD to the maximum of its possibilities.

Design and performance

Corsair showed us a preview of its product at Computex 2019, but it was not until this July when the product was launched on the market, in fact, it is already available for purchase in the two versions we have, 1 TB or 1000 GB and 2 TB or 2000 GB, although the prices are quite high. And it is that AMD has been the first to adopt the new PCIe 4.0 bus, which doubles in speed to version 3.0 with figures of almost 2000 MB / s in each lane.

Consequently, from this, the exclusivity of the product from manufacturers who have dared to implement this bus in their products from minute zero, make them enjoy a certain advantage. Specifically, this Corsair MP600 is an M.2 M-Key type SSD (the one with the cutout on the connector on the right) and in a standard size of 2280. The specific measurements, and with the heatsink mounted, are 80 mm long, 32 mm wide and 15 mm high.

The truth is that it is a quite high heatsink and consists of two removable parts in addition to a thermal pad built in silicone. Said heatsink is entirely made of aluminum and painted in black with the brand's logo in the central area, as well as the complete model. It has a total of 9 fins longitudinally on the surface, whose function is to dissipate all possible heat to the environment.

And it is that these units get quite hot due to the large data load they receive and the speeds they handle. Much more we would say that the SSD of the previous generation, so it will be common practice to find SSDs like this, with built-in heatsinks. In case we want to quickly place it under the heatsinks included in many of the boards, Corsair MP600 does not have its own pre-installed, but we recommend doing so because it offers greater benefits than the board drawings.

The way to place this is quite simple, we separate the two parts by opening the side brackets and place the thermal pad on the upper area (where the controller is). This will be the correct way to install the SSD, so we only have to place the bottom underneath and fix again by clicking the top area above. We already have it ready for your connection.

But before we will see in more detail the news that Corsair MP600 brings us from a technical point of view, because they are quite relevant. Like other units launched in parallel to this one with a PCIe 4.0 bus, we have memories based on NAND 3D TLC technology or triple level per cell. One of the few manufacturers that has memories capable of operating at these speeds is Toshiba, and specifically the BiCS4 model consisting of no less than 96 layers. This 2 TB model that we analyzed has four of these chips with a capacity of 512 GB of storage for each die, while the 1 TB model has 4 256 GB chips.

To manage this huge storage capacity, we have a Phison PS5016-A16 controller built from A12 in a 28nm manufacturing process. This model has been optimized not to address the 8TB that the A12 was capable of, but to vastly improve speed in more contained storage capacities, resulting in these huge transfer rates. It offers 8 NAND channels with 32 chips enabled to reach in this case at speeds of up to 800 MT / s. This Phison supports AES-256, TCG OPAL 2.0, and Pyrite encryption, as well as TRIM and SMART management over a processing ECC engine to optimize controller performance on the new PHY on the PCIe 4.0 bus.

This whole set is managed by EGFM10E3 Firmware, without which communication would not be possible under the new interface. In this way we can reach theoretical speeds of 4950 MB / s in sequential read mode or 4250 MB / s in sequential write mode, or what is the same, 600K IOPS and 680K IOPS in QD32. With all this, we will only have a consumption of 1.1 W in sleep mode, and an average of 6.5 W when it is operating.

In the Corsair MP600 its useful life has been optimized in a very impressive way, reaching up to 3600 TB of writing or a life of 1, 700, 000 hours of use, so the 5-year warranty is more than exceeded. The encapsulation withstands shocks of up to 1500 G, and operating temperatures of up to 70 ° C, although we do not plan to go to those extremes. It goes without saying that if we connect this unit to a PCIe 3.0 bus, we will be limiting the transfer rate to the maximum of the bus in x4, that is, 3940 MB / s.

SSD Toolbox software

Corsair MP600 also has support and management software that we can install for free by downloading it from the manufacturer's website. Its name is Corsair SSD Toolbox.

We have a total of 6 sections available in the program, through which we can monitor the status of the SSD such as temperature, estimated life and, of course, writings and readings made. We can also buy SMART status, perform drive optimizations, and even safely delete files. Something that also appears very interesting is being able to clone the hard drive to a target device or another hard drive, very interesting and without the need for external programs.

Unless you think about buying this, and another Corsair SSD, we recommend that you install this small program to keep your solid drive under control.

At the beginning of the analysis, we mentioned that the instructions included useful information about certain SSD settings in order to use it to the best of its ability. Many users will already know this, but it should be remembered. What we will have to do is go to the properties of the unit, and activate the option "Enable write cache on the device" in the policies tab.

Test equipment and benchmarks

To test this Corsair MP600, we have used the new AMD platform, with CPU and new generation motherboard with X570 chipset. The test bench is made up of the following elements:

AMD Ryzen 3700XAsus Crosshair VIII Formula16 GB G.Skill Trident Royal RGB 3600 MHz The stock in SSD and CPU Corsair MP600 Nvidia RTX 2060 FECorsair AX860i

We are going to carry out a series of synthetic tests or benchmarks to check the performance offered by this Corsair MP600 under the PCIe 4.0 bus under the NVMe 1.3 protocol. The benchmark programs that we have used are the following:

Crystal Disk MarkAS SSD BenchmarkATTO Disk BenchmarkAnvil´s Storage

All these programs are in their latest available version. Remember not to abuse these tests in your units, since the life time is reduced.

As is always the case, the results offered by CristalDiskMark are closest to the theoretical speed of the unit, but never reached its theoretical speed. In this case we have been very close, with those 4777 MB / s in reading, and be careful, because we have exceeded the performance in writing with 4278 MB / s, which is very good.

In the rest of the programs, the results we have are really close to, for example, the AORUS PCIe 4.0 SSD, even in ATTO these results are surpassed by the Corsair, which is great news for the manufacturer.

Temperatures

We have made use of the thermal camera to check the temperature of the SSD with and without workload.

This time we did observe somewhat higher temperatures than we expected with this heatsink. In idle state we have already reached 43 ° C just at the connection interface on the Corsair MP600, but also at the heatsink we have just over 38 ° C. If we happen to see a capture while doing the benchmarks, then the values go up to around 43 ° C and 52 ° C right on the interface.

They are not high values, but it is true that with a copper heatsink and a second thermal pad on the bottom of the SSD, we believe that the values would have been lower.

Final words and conclusion about Corsair MP600 2TB

The next generation of high-speed SSD drives are here, and Corsair is one of the first to introduce a drive to the market that will be the ideal complement for users who want to switch platforms to the new AMD Ryzen 3000 alongside the X570 chipset.

The most notable characteristic of an SSD is its speed, and in this Corsair MP600 we are reaching figures of 4, 700 MB / s for reading and almost 4, 300 MB / s for writing, more than what the manufacturer specifies in the latest brand.

We recommend our guide to the best SSDs of the moment.

The work Toshiba has done with these 96-layer 3D NANDs, along with the optimized Phison controller for this new bus, is spectacular. And Corsair contributes its grain of sand with a useful life that far exceeds previous-generation SSDs. We only see a very small drawback, and that is that the heatsink does not perform as much as we would like, the choice of copper instead of aluminum would have been more successful.

Finally we must report that this Corsair MP600 is already available in the brand's web store for a price of 450 euros for the 2 TB unit and 250 euros for the 1 TB unit. They are slightly higher figures than we have for current PCIe 3.0 SSDs, and we consider it normal in the specifications that we are moving, so, at least the 1 TB drive for us is recommended.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ PCIE 4.0 A +4700 MB / S	- A LITTLE FAIR HEATSINK
+ HIGH CAPACITY 1 AND 2 TB
+ CHOICE OF MEMORIES AND CONTROLLER
+ GOOD QUALITY / PRICE RATIO
+ WE RECOMMEND THE 1 TB DRIVE