The Force MP600 is Corsair's foot in the door for PCIe Gen.4 SSD market segment, using a combination of a Phison controller and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND, all sitting under a well designed aluminium heatsink. The Corsair Force MP600 family consists of (at the time of writing) three capacities; 500GB, 1TB (the drive we're looking at here) and the flagship 2TB drive. The drives use a combination of a Phison PS5016-E16 controller and Toshiba 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND. There is also 1GB of DDR4-2400 cache. Phison’s PS5016-E16 is the world’s first PCIe Gen4 x4 controller. An 8-channel controller, the PS5016-E is built on a 28nm process using a dual-core 32-bit ARM Cortex R5 processor (with a CoXprocessor) and can support up to 8TB of NAND at a speed of 800MT/s per channel. To help protect data it uses Phison's 4th Generation LDPC ECC engine and provides End-to-End data path protection. Officially the 1TB MP600 is rated up to 4,950MB/s and 4,250MB/s for Sequential read/writes respectively with a 4K random read figure of up to 680,000 IOPS (QD32) and writes up to 600,000 IOPS (QD32). Power-wise the drive is rated at an average active 6.4W which drops to 1.1W when the drive is idle. Corsair quote an endurance figure for the 1TB drive of 1,800 TBW and back the drive with a 5-year warranty. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 1TB. NAND Components: Toshiba BiCS4 3D TLC NAND. NAND Controller: Phison PSE5016-E16. Cache: 1GB SKhynix DDR4. Interface: PCIe Gen 4.0 x4. / NVMe 1.3. Form Factor: M.2, 2280. Dimensions: 80 x 23 x 15mm. Drive Weight: 0.034g. Firmware Version: EFGM11.1. The drive comes in a fairly compact box with a clear image of the drive on the front. Under the image is a strip label with performance figures for Sequential and 4K performance as well as the drive's capacity. The rear of the box has multilingual information about the drive using a Gen4 interface. The front of the M.2 2280 PCB is covered by the hefty aluminium heatsink, while the back is covered by the base of the cradle part of the heatsink. The heatsink on the MP600 has been well designed so it can be easily detached so that the drive can make use of a motherboard's own M.2 cooling system if it has one fitted or if space is at a premium. To remove the heatsink is just a matter of releasing the four clips that hold the heatsink to the backing cradle. The 1TB MP600 is built on a double-sided M.2 2280 format. One side holds the Phison PS5016-E16 controller, a SKhynix DDR4 DRAM cache IC and two Toshiba 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND packages. The other side of the PCB holds another pair of NAND packages and a second DRAM chip. Corsair’s SSD management utility is called SSD Toolbox. It provides drive information and S.M.A.R.T details and also supports firmware updates, secure wiping of the drive, drive optimisation and incorporates a disk cloning utility. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real-world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, 16GB DDR4, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an MSI Meg X570 Ace motherboard. Other Drives 1TB class Corsair Force MP510 960GB Crucial P1 1TB Patriot Viper VPN4100 1TB (PCIe Gen4) Patriot Viper VPN100 1TB PNY CS3030 1TB Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB Samsung SSD970 PRO 1TB Samsung SSD960 EVO 1TB Samsung SSD960 EVO Plus 1TB Toshiba BG4 1TB Toshiba XG6 1TB Western Digital Black SN750 1TB Western Digital Black SN750 1TB with Heatsink Western Digital Black NVMe 1TB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark 3.05 / 4.00. CrystalMark 6.0.0 / 7.0 AS SSD 2.0. IOMeter. Futuremark PC Mark 8 All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v6.0. In CrystalDiskMark's QD32 test, the Corsair Force MP600 makes it into the top 5 fastest 1TB consumer drives we have tested to date, but it's not as fast as the other Gen4 drive we've tested, Patriot's Viper VP4100. At a queue depth of 1, the Gen4 Viper VP4100 just has the edge over the MP600 when it comes to writes in CrystalDiskMark. We have just started to test drives with version 7 of CrystalDiskMark. The latest version of CrystalDiskMark includes a couple of profiles that can be used for testing, Peak Performance and Real World. The result screens for these two profiles not only display MB/s results but also IOPS and latency. Looking at the Peak Performance results for Sequential read/write performance we see that it confirms the official figures for the Force MP600 of 4.950MB/s and 4,250MB/s respectively. However, the fastest read IOPS figure of 635,500 IOPS is shy of the official maximum of 680,000 IOPS while the write figure of 561,841 IOPS is a little closer to the official maximum of 600,000 IOPS. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. We are using version 3.5 for our NVMe disk tests but will soon move over to version 4.0 so we've included the results for that benchmark as well. The official Sequential performance figures for the 1TB MP600 are quoted as up to 4,950MB/s for reads and up to 4,250MB/s for writes. Using the 3.5 version of the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite get to the maximum official read figure using a 2MB file size, the drive topping out at 4,717MB/s. However the write test provided a figure of 4,418MB/s, some 168MB/s faster than the official write figure. With the 4.0 version of ATTO, we still couldn't quite to the maximum quoted sequential speeds for either reads or writes. The drive producing a read figure of 4.39GB/s with writes at 3.97GB/s. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. In the ASSSD results chart, the Force MP600 slips into second place behind the other Gen4 drive we have tested, the Patriot Viper VP4100. IOMeter is another open-source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on a hard drive and solid-state drive technology. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable. We test 128KB Sequential read and write and random read and write 4k tests. The test setup’s for the tests are listed below. Each is run five times. 128KB Sequential Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 128KB Span: 8GB Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Sustained Random Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Thread(s): 4, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Random 70/30 mix Read/Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Reads: 70% Writes: 30% Thread(s): 4 Outstanding I/O: 2 – 32 Test Run: 20 minutes With our own Sequential read/write tests we could not only confirm the official figures of 4,950MB/s for reads and 4,250MB/s for writes but better them. The drive produced a peak read figure of 5,024.08MB/s and peak writes at 4,324.88MB/s. 128KB Sequential Read Performance v QD At a queue depth of 1, the Force MP600 is a tiny bit faster than the Patriot VP4100, but as the queue depth deepens, the Patriot drive takes over. 128KB Sequential Write Performance v QD At all the tested queue depths apart from QD1, the Force MP600 has a slight advantage over the Patriot Viper VP4100. The official IOPS 4K random read rating for the drive is up to 680,000 IOPS (QD32). With our 4K four threaded tests, the fastest read speed we saw was 370,900 IOPS, at a QD of 32. 4K Sustained Random Read Performance v QD The Force MP600 falls behind the Gen4 Patriot Viper VP4100 in our 4K random read tests at all the tested queue depths. With our four threaded, 4K random write tests we couldn't get anywhere near to the official top end 600,000 IOPS. The best figure we saw from our own tests was 174,928 IOPS at a QD of 8. 4K Sustained Random Write Performance v QD As with our 4K random read test results, the Force MP600 trails behind Patriot's Gen4 Viper VP4100. The Force MP600 displays strong performance in our 70/30 read/write mixed test with good performance figures and fairly low latencies. The tested peak throughput performance for Corsair's Force MP600 came at the 8K block mark at 3,965.73MB/s, some way of the official maximum of 4,950MB/s. In our throughput test, the Corsair Force MP600 just has the edge over the other Gen4 SSD in the list, Patriot's Viper VP4100. Peak write performance came at the 4K block mark at 4,298.89MB/s, slightly better than the official maximum of 4,250MB/s. As with the read throughput test, the Force MP600 has a very slight edge over the Patriot drive. Futuremark’s PCMark 8 is a very good all-round system benchmark but it’s Storage Consistency Test takes it to a whole new level when testing SSD drives. It runs through four phases; Preconditioning, Degradation, Steady State, Recovery and finally Clean Up. During the Degradation, Steady State and Recovery phases it runs performance tests using the 10 software programs that form the backbone of PCMark 8; Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop Heavy and Photoshop Light, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft. With some 18 phases of testing, this test can take many hours to run. Preconditioning The drive is written sequentially through up to the reported capacity with random data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. This is done twice. Degradation Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for 10 minutes. It then runs a performance test. These two actions are then repeated 8 times and on each pass the duration of random writes is increased by 5 minutes. Steady State Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for final duration achieved in degradation phase. A performance test is then run. These actions are then re-run five times. Recovery The drive is idled for 5 minutes. Then a performance test is run. These actions are then repeated five times. Clean Up The drive is written through sequentially up to the reported capacity with zero data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. Overall the Corsair Force MP600 handles the rigours of the PCMark 8 Consistency test well, without any alarming dips in bandwidth during the test and it recovers pretty well from the ordeal. PCMark 8’s Consistency test provides a huge amount of performance data, so here we’ve looked a little closer at how the 1TB Force MP600 performs in each of the benchmarks test suites. Adobe Creative Cloud The two Adobe Photoshop test traces really push a drive hard and the Force MP600 is no exception. The drive does, however, recover well with an average across the five recovery runs of 915.18MB/s for the Photoshop Light trace and 909.17MB/s for the Photoshop heavy one. Microsoft Office Usually in the Microsoft Office tests, it's the Word trace that causes problems for a drive but not in this case, as the Force MP600 handles that test extremely well. No, what causes this drive to drop bandwidth is the Excel trace. There are fairly sharp drops in the second and eighth Degradation test run and the fifth and final Steady State run. However, the drive does recover reasonably well. Casual Gaming The drive handles the Battlefield 3 trace a lot more efficiently than the World of Warcraft one, which it seems to struggle with. Having said that the recovery from the WoW test is very impressive. Just like the Consistency test, PCMark 8’s Standard Storage Test also saves a large amount of performance data. The default test runs through the test suite of 10 applications three times. Here we show the total bandwidth performance for each of the individual test suites for the third and final benchmark run. The Corsair Force MP600 displays strong performance throughout PCMark 8's Standard Storage test. The best bandwidth figures come from the two Photoshop tests at 1,045MB/s and 1,024MB/s for the Photoshop Light and Photoshop Heavy tests respectively. For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The 1TB Force MP600 averaged 99,446 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 66%. To test real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. 100GB data file. 60GB iso image. 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 21GB 8K Movie demos. 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files). 11GB 4K Raw Movie Clips (8 MP4V files). 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of png, raw and jpeg images). 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files). 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo. Blu-ray movie. The Force MP600 had no problems dealing with our real-life file transfer tests. The drive is much more efficient at handling larger file sizes than the smaller files found in the 60GB Steam, 50GB file and 10GB audio folders. To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSD's we use the same files but transfer to and from a 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400. Taking the SATA SSD out of the picture gives an idea of just how capable the Force MP600 is. The 60GB ISO file took 1m 52s to write to the SATA drive and 2m 8s to come back the other way, whereas it takes just 44.1 seconds to write to the NVMe drive and 42.7 seconds to read the data back. The 21GB 8K movie scene folder took 31 seconds to write to the SATA drive but a mere 6 seconds to write to the Toshiba OCZ RD400 NVMe drive. PCIe Gen4 SSD's are slowly trickling into the market place and Corsair is one of the first out of the gate with the Force MP600 drive. At the heart of the Force MP600 is one of Phison’s PS5016-E16 controller’s, the world’s first PCIe Gen4 x4 controller (and at the time of writing, the only Gen4 controller). The 8-channel controller looks after, in the case of the 1TB drive, four packages of Toshiba's latest BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. There is also 1GB of DDR-2400 cache. Official Sequential figures for the 1TB drive are up to an impressive 4,950MB/s and 4,250MB/s for read and writes respectively. Using the ATTO 3.5 benchmark we couldn’t quite match that read figure with the review drive producing a figure of 4,717MB/s. However, the tested write result of 4,418MB/s was some 168MB/s faster than the official write figure. With our own Sequential tests, we could better both official figures, the drive producing figures of 5,024.08MB/s (QD32) and 4,324.88MB/s (QD16) for read and writes respectively. In terms of random 4K performance, the official performance figures are up to 680,000 IOPS for reads and 600,000 IOPS for writes. With our 4 threaded tests, we couldn’t get close to those maximums with the drive. The fastest speeds we saw using our own 4K tests were 370,900 IOPS (QD32) for reads and 174,920 IOPS (QD8) for writes. We then tested the drive, again at a QD of 32 but this time with 8 threads and got a read figure of 551,626 IOPS with writes at 481,324 IOPS, still far short of the official maximum figures. The closest we came to the official maximums was with the Peak Performance profile test in CrystalDiskMark 7 which produced a read figure of 635,500 IOPS with writes at 561,841 IOPS. To prevent the drive from overheating when dealing with heavy workloads it uses a well-designed aluminium heatsink. If you have a motherboard which has its own cooling system for M.2 drives, no problem, as the heatsink can be easily removed from the drive, just by releasing four clips, a nice touch that. It's a very quick drive that, thanks to its hefty heatsink, looks the part, but to get the full benefit of all that performance offered by the PCIe 4.0 interface you need to install it in a motherboard supporting a combination of an X570 chipset and an AMD Ryzen 3000 series processor. Installing it in any other motherboard will see it working at PCIe Gen3 x4. We found the 1TB Corsair Force MP600 for £218.99 (inc VAT) on Overclockers UK HERE Pros PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD. Sequential performance. Well designed heatsink. Endurance. Cons Needs a X570/Ryzen 3000 combination to get the full benefit of the technology. Tested 4K performance couldn’t match the official maximum figures. Pricey. Kitguru says: Thanks to its PCIe Gen4.0 x4 interface, the Force MP600 is currently the fastest drive in Corsair's SSD inventory with very quick Sequential read/write speeds. The only fly in the ointment is that it does need the latest AMD hardware to do it.
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