Corsair MP600 Core M.2 2280 2TB PCIe Gen 4.0 x4, NVMe 1.3 3D QLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) CSSD-F2000GBMP600COR

Pros: I have owned several Corsair SSD's over the years. My first experience with SSD's was with two Corsair Force 3 240 GB SSD's in RAID 0, back then, that was crazy fast. Both of those drives are still working today, many years later. Actually I have owned a ton of Corsair peripherals and hardware. From several sets of RAM, to probably 30 or more Corsair case fans, to mice and keyboards, SSD's, power supplies, CLC coolers, and wireless headsets just to name a few. These days, solid state drives rule the enthusiast market. Corsair was one of the first to hop on that band wagon, so they have years of experience in design and manufacturing to draw upon. With the introduction of the MP600 Core M.2 NVMe SSD, Corsair was one of the first to come up with a Gen 4 M.2 SSD that was blazing fast. The way this drive comes packaged is pretty impressive. It was actually a bit of a pain to get it out of the box because it was so tightly packaged. The SSD is seated inside this big chunk of foam that will protect it during shipping, that is always nice bonus.

With this MP600 2TB drive, both the read and write speeds are exceptional. I am still on PCIe 3.0, so this drive is undoubtedly maxing out the bandwidth of my PCIe 3.0 interface at x4. My system is a 9900K on an z390 Dark. I don't have a lot of experience with M.2 SSDs, but I have been using a 1 TB 960 Evo M.2 for the past couple of years that I am able to compare it to. In every single benchmark, this drive destroys the 960 Evo. The primary difference between my old drive and this one is the write speeds are significantly higher, almost double. Read speeds are higher too, but write speeds are not only higher, they're more consistent with files of any size and over a much longer duration. During testing, I copied a 100 GB file from each drive onto itself and the MP600 maintained maximum transfer speeds throughout the entire testing period. I believe much of that is attributed to the design of the SSD and the heat sink keeping temperatures in check. The heat sink is a beast, it covers both sides of the SSD, a design that I found very impressive. One of the benefits of the heat sink covering the entire SSD, except on the ends where it mounts to your motherboard and connects to the M.2 slot, is that it would be impossible to damage it by simply handling it, or letting it sit out on top of something unprotected. Temperatures never exceeded 58C, so it never thermal throttled. I performed benchmarks comparing my two drives with multiple passes of file sizes between 1 and 16 GB. I used 3 different benchmarks, AS SSD, Crystal Disk Mark and Samsung Magician. I am using the most recent versions of each. I monitored temperatures during benchmarking and after several hours of activity, temperatures never rose to a point that I would be concerned about. I used AIDA64 to monitor the temperatures of my SSDs.

Samsung Magician:

960 Evo 1 TB on PCI-e 3.0
Sequential Read: 2929 MB/s
Sequential Write: 1812 MB/s
Random Read: 363, 281 IOPS
Random Write: 166,259 IOPS

MP600 Core 2 TB on PCI-e 3.0
Sequential Read: 3541 MB/s
Sequential Write: 3320 MB/s
Random Read: 528,649 IOPS
Random Write: 775,029 IOPS

AS SSD: (Note: Seq tests are file size of 10 GB, 4K are 1 GB)

960 Evo 1 TB on PCI-e 3.0
Seq. Read: 2807 MB/s
Seq. Write: 1097 MB/s
4K Read: 43.6 MB/s
4K Write: 141.66 MB/s
Access Time Read: .084 ms
Access Time Write: .026 ms

MP600 Core 2 TB on PCI-e 3.0
Seq. Read: 3340 MB/s
Seq. Write: 3180 MB/s
4K Read: 61.9 MB/s
4K Write: 163.4 MB/s
Access Time Read: .027 ms
Access Time Write: .020 ms

Crystal Disk Mark:

960 Evo 1 TB on PCI-e 3.0
File Size 16 GB
Seq Read: 2754 MB/s
Seq Write: 1157 MB/s
File Size 1 GB
Seq Read: 2858 MB/s
Seq Write: 1856 MB/s
4K 8QT8 Read: 1467 MB/s
4K 8QT8 Write: 1366 MB/s
4K 32Q1T Read: 709 MB/s
4K 32Q1T Write: 601 MB/s
4K 1Q1T Read: 48.8 MB/s
4K 1Q1T Write: 170.9 MB/s

MP600 Core 2TB on PCI-e 3.0
File Size 16 GB
Seq Read: 3521 MB/s
Seq Write: 3254 MB/s
File Size 1 GB
Seq Read: 3551 MB/s
Seq Write: 3280 MB/s
4K 8QT8 Read: 1667 MB/s
4K 8QT8 Write: 2969 MB/s
4K 32Q1T Read: 1654 MB/s
4K 32Q1T Write: 2141 MB/s
4K 1Q1T Read: 56.4 MB/s
4K 1Q1T Write: 284.3 MB/s

Cons: I have been thoroughly impressed with the performance of this SSD. Considering it's performance, this drive is at an extremely competitive price point, making it perfect for a gaming PC. Although, at this time, M.2 SSDs aren't really a budget friendly option for the average PC gamer. Putting them out of reach for the average PC builder who is more concerned with maximizing their frames per second, with system responsiveness taking a back seat. M.2 SSDs are typically not very high in capacity, making them less than ideal as the sole data drive for the modern gaming PC. With many recent games exceeding 100 GB each, it limits the number of games you can have installed at any one time. I got the 2 TB version of this drive, which I would say is the sweet spot for SSD storage. 1 TB really limits how many games you can have installed at any given time.

The heat sink on this SSD sits quite a bit higher than I anticipated. The heat sink sits .466 in., or 11.8 mm, above the PCB of the SSD. I measured it with my calipers. So that is something to take into consideration if your motherboard has a tight fit for your M.2 SSD. I don't know of any instances of this being the case, but it would be wise to check before ordering one of these. In my system there's a ton of space, it's not even close. Even in the slot directly behind the graphics card there's plenty of room.

Overall Review: With the extremely impressive write speeds of this MP600 SSD, it makes it absolutely perfect for the content creator who wants to capture high resolution gaming at the native quality and frame rate, whether you're on PCI-e 3.0 or 4.0. I was an early adopter of 4K. As soon as the first reasonably priced 4K monitor was available in the US, I had it preordered. I wanted to post videos on YouTube of the incredible quality 4K gaming had to offer, but at that time there was one major limiting factor, the data write speed of my hard drive. I had one of the fastest hard drives money could buy at that time and it wasn't even close to fast enough. So I upgraded to RAID 0 SSD's, which were fast enough, but capacity was a major issue for native 4K at 60 fps. With the blazing fast write speeds and huge capacity of this 2 TB SSD, it won't have any trouble with that whatsoever.

The primary benefit of any quality M.2 SSD is system responsiveness. The days of sitting and waiting for your system to boot up are over. With this M.2 SSD, your system is ready to go as fast as it can turn on and there's no waiting, ever. Well, there are still some things that will make you wait a bit, but it won't be because your storage drive is a major bottleneck like it was in the days of mechanical hard drives.

For the performance it offers, the price point of this drive is absolutely excellent. Just two years ago, when I bought my 960 Evo, it cost about the same for what this drive is selling for, with only 1 TB of storage. The Corsair MP600 Core Gen 4 M.2 SSD is as fast as many drives that are much more expensive. The Corsair MP600 Core was one of the first Gen 4 M.2 SSD's to be released, so it's not the fastest drive available anymore. But the price reflects that. Putting it in a sweet spot with a balance of speed, capacity, and price point. If you're like me, and still on a system with PCI-e 3.0, if you're planning to upgrade within the next few years, the smartest thing to do would be to buy a drive that offers some future proofing like this one. If you're on PCI-e 3.0, getting a gen 4 drive like this one is a great idea, so that when you do upgrade, you'll unlock the full performance of this drive without having to dedicate a portion of your build budget to an SSD. I really don't have anything negative to say about this drive specifically. The Corsair MP600 Core 2 TB M.2 NVMe SSD met or exceeded all of my expectations, 5 Eggs, very highly recommended.

Pros: Fast

Cons: Cost
Crashed

Overall Review: Until it wasn't. It worked great for about a month. A couple days before the end computer would stop spawning new tasks and finally just freeze. A couple days of that and then the bios said drive failed S.M.A.R.T. test and wouldn't boot.