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The Core Mini comes in a very compact box with a clear image of the drive on the front. Under the image is a strip label with performance figures for the Sequential read / write performance as well as the drive’s capacity. The rear of the box has multilingual information about the drive's performance.
The 1TB MP600 Core Mini is built on a single-sided M.2 2230 format.
Under the top product label sits a Phison PS5021-E21-48 controller and a single 1TB package of Micron 176-layer 3D QLC NAND (coded ICBIG96AZA). Phison's PS5021-E21-48 is built on a 12nm TSMC process and comes in a 7.5 x 12mm package. The 4-channel controller has been designed for DRAM-less operation relying instead on HMB (Host Memory Buffer) technology.
The single CPU architecture, using a built-in ARM 32-bit Cortex-R5, supports up to 8TB of both TLC or QLC NAND (Toggle 5.0 and ONFi 5.0 compliant) at speeds of up to 5,000MB/s and 4,000MB/s for Sequential reads and writes respectively with random performance quoted as up to 780,000 IOPS for reads and up to 800,000 IOPS for writes. Data reliability is provided by Phison's 5th generation LDPC ECC along with End-To-End Data Path Protection. It also supports AES 256-bit Encryption.
SSD Toolbox is Corsair's SSD management utility. Its GUI does look a bit dated compared to some of its rivals and could do with a bit of a refresh but it does provide all you really need to keep an eye on the drive and how it's performing. With it, you can check on drive information, and S.M.A.R.T details perform firmware updates, secure wiping of the drive, drive optimisation and it even incorporates a very handy disk cloning utility.
