It's been a while since Corsair launched its first flagship M.2 2280 NVMe drive, the Force MP500, into the market – but now over a year later we have its successor, the Force MP510.
The previous MP500 used a combination of Phison's PS5007-E7 controller and 15nm MLC NAND while the new drive uses the latest 2nd generation Phison NVMe controller in combination with Toshiba's 64-layer 256Gb BiCS3 3D TLC NAND.
The official performance figures for the 960GB MP510 are impressive. Sequential read/writes are quoted at up to 3,480MB/s for reads and up to 3,000MB/s for writes. We could confirm those figures as the review drive when tested with the ATTO benchmark produced 3,414MB/s for reads with writes coming in at 3,012MB/s. Incidentally that Sequential write score is the fastest we've seen from a consumer NVMe M.2 drive to date.
Corsair also quotes some impressive 4K random numbers for the 960GB drive. 4K Random reads are quoted as up to 610,000 IOPS, writes up to 570,000 IOPS. Unfortunately with our random 4K tests we couldn't anywhere near those official figures with 367,239 IOPS being the best read figure we could get with writes at 281,757 IOPS both at a queue depth of 32.
Corsair have been ruthless with the MP510 drive when it comes to competitive pricing. You can find the 960GB version of the MP510 for around £230. Taking the drive that sits above it in our ATTO benchmark graph as an example, WD's Black NVMe 1TB drive retails around some sixty quid more expensive at £293 and the MP510 has a faster Sequential write speed. More to the point it kicks sand in the face of Corsair's own 960GB MP300 (1,600MB/s reads 1,080MB/s) which is only around twenty quid cheaper. It's also light years cheaper than the previous MP500.
You can find the 960GB Corsair MP510 available on Overclockers for £169.99 (inc VAT) HERE (updated April 2019).
Pros
- Overall Performance.
- Sequential write performance.
- Endurance.
- Pricing.
Cons
- Couldn't match those official 4K Random figures.
KitGuru says: It's been a while since we've seen a Corsair drive and it's been well worth the wait. Corsair claims the MP510 is their fastest SSD to date and they're not kidding. Fast, well priced with very good endurance – what's not to like!