While enthusiasts are now mainly focused on SSDs with PCIe 5.0 interfaces, there are also many people who would prefer a drive with PCIe 4.0 interfaces to upgrade a PlayStation 5 or PC they bought a few years ago. To meet the needs of these customers, SSD manufacturers need to offer products that offer the right balance between price and performance. That’s exactly what Corsair has done with its MP600 Elite device.
Corsair this week released the MP600 Elite, a new SSD series aimed at the mainstream market. The drive is based on Phison’s low-power, highly integrated PS5027-E27T platform, which is designed to build mainstream DRAM-less drives. The controller supports 3D TLC and 3D QLC NAND flash memory through the four-channel Toggle 5.0/ONFi 5.0 interface, with data transfer rates up to 3600 MT/s. Host connectivity, meanwhile, is provided via the PCIe 4.0 x4 interface.
With its MP600 Elite SSD, Corsair isn’t trying to offer the fastest PCIe Gen4 drive on the market, but rather trying to offer the best value in 3D TLC-powered 1 TB, 2 TB and 4 TB configurations. The drives will deliver sequential read performance of up to 7,000 MB/s and write performance of up to 6,500 MB/s, as well as random read and write speeds of up to 1,000K and 1,200K IOPS, respectively, for PCIe Gen4 SSDs.
To maximize the compatibility of the MP600 Elite drives (and make them compatible with Sony’s PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Slim), Corsair has given them a micro aluminum heatsink and a thinner graphene heatsink.
The main idea behind the Corsair MP600 Elite is its affordability: it does not require DRAM or complex cooling systems, thus optimizing costs for manufacturers. Corsair, meanwhile, offers a 1 TB MP600 Elite SSD with a graphene heat spreader for $89.99 and a 2 TB MP600 Elite SSD with a graphene heat spreader for $164.99 (while the MP600 Elite SSD with an aluminum heat spreader version is $5 cheaper), which isn’t particularly cheap. For example, the faster Corsair MP600 Pro LPX 2 TB costs $169.99.
Each drive comes with a five-year warranty and can withstand up to 1,200 terabytes written (TBW).