Corsair MP700 Elite Review: First Phison E31T Gen5 SSD Tested

	Corsair MP700 Elite PCIe Gen 5 SSD: $259 MSRP, (2TB) The new Corsair MP700 Elite PCIe Gen 5 SSD outguns previous-gen DRAM-less drives and consumes less power than flagship Gen 5 drives, to strike a great balance for a wide range of systems.
	Good Sequential Transfers Relaitvely Low Power No Heatsink Required (But Recommended) Fast 4K Transfers At QD1	Not Always Faster Than Gen 4 Drives Street Prices Too High (For Now)

Corsair MP700 Elite Specifications And Features

Find The Corsair MP700 Elite @ Amazon

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The drive you see pictured here is the 2TB Corsair MP700 Elite -- a 1TB model with similar performance and features is also coming down the pipeline. Corsair rates the MP700 Elite for 10GB/s reads and 8.5GB/s write, with random read and write IOPS of up to 1.3M and 1.4M, respectively, which is somewhat lower than Phison's reference specs, but we suspect Corsair is just being conservative with their numbers. Endurance is rated for 600TBW on the 1TB model and 1,200TBW on the 2TB model. 

The Phison E31T at the heart of the Corsair MP700 Elite is a native PCIe Gen 5 controller, with 4 lanes of PCIe connectivity, that’s manufactured on TSMC’s 7nm process node. Paired to the controller are a couple of pieces of Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND, operating at 3,600MT/s. The combination of TSMC’s 7nm manufacturing process, the lack of DRAM (Phison E31T-based drives will be DRAM-less HMB devices), the E31T’s updated architecture, and Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND, results is a relatively low-power drive that’ll be at home in desktops, notebooks and laptops. The PS4 power state is only 3.5mW and the drive peaks at only 6.1W. Average power is 5.9W, though. 

Due to its relatively low-power operation, the Phison E31T-based Corsair MP700 Elite does not absolutely require a heatsink for general operation and everyday computing tasks, but one is recommended for extended workloads, as is the case with virtually all modern NVMe M.2 SSDs. In fact, Corsair will be offering two models of the drive -- one without heatsink (like you see here) and one with a heatsink included. If your motherboard's got built-in M.2 heat spreaders, the bare drive is all you'll need. 

Corsair MP700 Elite w/ Heatsink

The Corsair MP700 Elite is about as simple as an M.2 SSD can be. The controller, a couple of pieces of NAND, and a few caps and inductors are mounted on the top-side of the PCB, and the backside is completely bare except for some vias and a decal with some product details. The form-factor pictured here is a common 2280 gum stick, just like the vast majority of other consumer NVMe M.2 SSDs. 

To see where Corsair's MP700 Elite lands relative to other drives on the market, we compared its performance to a varied mix of PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 drives, including one based on Phison’s higher-end E26 Gen 5 controller and the Phison’s E31T reference platform. 

Corsair MP700 Elite SSD Benchmarks

Under each test condition, the SSDs featured here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and Windows 11 was fully updated as well. Windows Firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing, and Focus Assist was enabled to prevent any interruptions. 

HotHardware's Test System:

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IOMeter Benchmarks

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; a custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access. Queue depths from 1 to 16 were tested... 

SiSoft SANDRA 2022

Next, we used SiSoft SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant for some quick tests. Here, we used the File System Test and provide the results from our comparison SSDs. Read and write performance metrics, along with the overall drive score, are detailed below. 

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5KB through 64MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

Once it got rolling at about the 64K transfer size, the Corsair MP700 Elite was able to stretch its legs and land in second place overall, slightly ahead of the reference platform (despite Corsair's more conservative specs), but the higher-end Phison-based MSI Spatium M570 Pro.

Read and write IO throughput was a mixed bag. The Corsair MP700 Elite was competitive with the other drives throughout, but laned about in the middle of the pack in the write test. However, it typically trailed all but the reference drive in the read test.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark

Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test is interesting because it uses a mix of compressible and non-compressible data and outputs both Read and Write throughput of the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.

The compressibility of the data being transferred across the drives we tested had virtually no impact on performance, and the Corsair MP700 Elite landed about in the middle of the pack, well ahead of all of the PCIe Gen 4 drives, and slightly higher than the reference E31T.