Corsair MP700 Elite SSD review: The retail, budget PCIe 5.0 SSD of choice is officially here

The Corsair MP700 Elite is one of the first retail drives based on the E31T controller, although we have the Addlink G55 waiting in the wings. (Spoiler alert: It’s effectively the same performance, just without the Corsair brand name.) The MP700 Elite isn’t intended to hang with drives built on the faster Phison E26 controller, or at least not the higher-end variants that came after the initial launch of 10 GB/s PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The Crucial T705 shows what that latter controller can do, with no comparable drive available with SMI’s SM2508 just yet but with the Adata Legend 970 Pro available using InnoGrit’s competing IG5666 controller.

Drives that might be in more danger include the most popular, high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs. These consist of the Samsung 990 Pro, the WD Black SN850X, and the SK hynix Platinum P41. It may be more fair to compare the MP700 Elite with the four-channel Crucial T500, but remember that it and the previous three drives listed all have DRAM. There’s some question about whether or not DRAM is needed today, but arguably it’s still useful for workhorse drives.

Directly comparable drives would be DRAM-less and these include the Samsung 990 EVO Plus and the Silicon Power US75, the latter representing a host of popular drives including the Teamgroup MP44, the Lexar NM790, and the Addlink A93. At least one of these drives, the MP44, has been found with the E27T and BiCS6 flash instead of the launch MAP1602 and 232-Layer YMTC TLC flash, for which Corsair also has an answer with its Corsair MP600 Elite. It’s also possible to use QLC flash, as is the case with the Crucial P310, but such drives should be less expensive with a heavier focus on capacity.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

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The MP700 Elite easily matches or beats any drive that came before it, excepting the high-end PCIe 5.0 T705 and similar drives using the E26 controller. The T500 deserves an honorable mention, demonstrating that newer flash and DRAM can help a drive stay relevant. Both the T500 and MP700 Elite have Phison’s DirectStorage-optimized I/O+ firmware which may become more important with future game titles.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

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PCMark 10 performance is also exceptional. If you really want the most bandwidth and best application performance, an E26-based drive like the T705 or Sabrent Rocket 5 is still the best option. There’s no substitute for 14+ GB/s of bandwidth with a DRAM-equipped, eight-channel controller, but that’s not to say the MP700 Elite is a slouch — it surpasses the best PCIE 4.0 drives in this test.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

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We’ve adjusted our PS5 scores so everything lines up and, unsurprisingly, the MP700 Elite is right in the mix. It’s only running at PCIe 4.0 speeds in the PS5, which limits its potential to some degree, but it will be very efficient in this mode. We wouldn’t recommend using it for a PS5 unless the price is right, as there are plenty of 4.0 drives that can provide an equivalent experience.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

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The MP700 Elite’s PCIe 5.0 interface allows it to have a higher throughput than 4.0 drives. However, it can’t match a true monster like the T705. You do at least get faster transfers with this drive over high-end PCIe 4.0 options. Our DiskBench test is only 50GB in size so it shows a typical real-world example, while our write saturation test found below is better for gauging sustained writes, and it also indicates how larger writes on a fuller drive might run.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

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Our ATTO results for the MP700 Elite are somewhat more consistent than with the original E31T ES, but it does appear that more optimization is possible. In part this might be due to the flash being used, which is novel, considering that Phison’s other most recent controllers have leaned more heavily on Micron flash. You can see shades of this with CDM’s sequential read QD1 result, where the T500 actually comes out ahead. With queue depth and with writes, however, the MP700 Elite has no problem running away from the PCIe 4.0 SSD field.

More impressive is the small I/O, low queue depth performance. Looking at random 4KB latencies, both for reads and writes, the MP700 Elite delivers. We discussed possible reasons for this in our E31T ES review but, to quickly recap, the faster I/O speed and the architecture of the flash both support improvements in this area. If you’re someone who really focuses on this type of performance, you’re not sacrificing anything with this drive.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the “native” TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes or more (60 minutes in this case) to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

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Usually manufacturers use favorable testing conditions for drive specifications, and we cover those results with our CDM/ATTO testing, as well as here with a 1MiB block size at QD32. The MP700 Elite’s pSLC sustained write speed hits up to 8.8 GB/s, higher than the spec sheet’s 8.5 GB/s. It can sustain this for 50 seconds for a ~440GB cache, which is large but far from being as large as it could be.

This helps improve “quality of service” or QoS, which essentially means that the drive remains reasonably responsive even when hit with an expectedly long workload. A larger cache can sustain maximum performance longer, but when a drive is realistically used it’s going to be fuller and that dynamic cache will in turn be smaller. Thus it’s important for the performance state, in the rare case the cache runs out, to be better in order to prevent a jarring transition and a weaker long tail response.

This is realized with the direct-to-TLC performance state, which achieves 1.5 GB/s or so once the pSLC cache runs out on the MP700 Elite. This sounds slow in comparison to the rated write speed but is actually pretty decent for a native flash speed. Faster is certainly possible, but there’s always a need to balance the cache size with this state’s performance level. It’s only after a truly extreme write duration that the drive falls to folding at around half this speed, which is still better than anything you see from QLC flash even in its native state.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you’re looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.

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It’s difficult to understate the impressiveness of the MP700 Elite’s power efficiency. This is a drive that can hit performance numbers that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago and it does it with a DRAM-less, four-channel controller. This is good news for the future of SSDs, as this is ostensibly a budget-oriented drive — we’ll have to see how prices change in the coming months. While in real-world terms the user experience isn’t greatly improved with faster SSDs and the average power draw of any SSD is relatively low, there’s no one who is going to turn down more efficient hardware.

With the MP700 Elite’s lower power draw — being more efficient doesn’t mean the average or max consumption numbers are necessarily lower, as the higher performance level can finish workloads faster — cooling is much less of a concern. This drive can be run without a heatsink, and that makes it great for laptops. On the other hand, in some scenarios you might want a heatsink and Corsair allows for that by offering a heatsinked option. A heatsink can improve aesthetics and, in hot environments or where you might be running heavier workloads, it keeps the drive temperature in check.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Corsair MP700 Elite Bottom Line

The Corsair MP700 Elite is the quintessential “budget” PCIe 5.0 SSD. It has excellent performance in every test, usually beating every 4.0 drive under the sun. This is an accomplishment for a four-channel, DRAM-less solution all on its own. That it manages this with exceptional power efficiency is the icing on the cake. You can finally put a retail PCIe 5.0 SSD into your laptop! Heck, it’ll be even more efficient in a 4.0 slot. The sustained write performance could be better, sure, but it’s still pretty good for this class of drive and the large cache should handle anything you throw at it.

This high level of power efficiency means you can run the drive without a heatsink, but Corsair still offers that option. This is a nice touch as the MP700 Elite is still a high-performance drive. It will be interesting to see what happens when faster TLC flash comes out and, for that matter, when denser QLC flash is available. It will soon become possible to have fast, efficient, capacious storage without some of the question marks DRAM-less drives used to bring and without the compromises crazy high-end drives require. That said, the Crucial T500 provides a good counter-argument with 4TB of fast TLC flash and DRAM to boot.

If we have an issue with the MP700 Elite, it’s with the pricing. We need to see this drive on the market for a while, until its availability and pricing settle down. It could be priced at the same level as high-end PCIe 4.0 solutions and it would be tough to have a problem with that, given its performance results. The problem there is that the T500 can butt its way in and undercut that price very effectively, especially as it has a 4TB SKU. The MP700 Elite would still be the choice for PCIe 5.0 laptops, but it could be a harder sell in other areas. True storage enthusiasts can always jump up to the E26-based drives in a desktop and, for the PS5, the MP700 Elite is just as much overkill as other PCIe 5.0 drives.

That leaves us impressed but patient. This is new technology that pushes the bar higher, but it still needs to be practically priced in a market that’s quite volatile. On paper and in testing it hits all the right notes to be the “perfect” all-around drive, even in a PCIe 4.0 slot, but it could be better with some optimization and better pricing — hopefully, through competition. In that way it’s still a drive of the future rather than of now, but we have no problem recommending it if you want that kind of experience today.

If you’re looking for 4TB, then drives in the realm of the Teamgroup MP44 remain most viable right now, and these drives are simply more affordable at lower capacities, too. If you need DRAM there’s the T500, and if you need higher sustained performance there are the tried-and-true high-end PCIe 4.0 options. The MP700 Elite’s overall performance is still quite excellent against any of these drives, though, and if you want the best power efficiency — and especially if you want that in a 5.0 drive — the MP700 Elite should be the first on your list.