Corsair Force MP500 480GB SSD Review

Rating: 8.5.

The storage arm of Corsair has been pretty quiet over the last few months; the last drive we looked at was the Neutron XTi high-end drive back in July 2016. But they are back with a bang at the sharp end with the Force MP500, the fastest SSD drive they have released to date.

The M.2 2280 format Force MP500 uses a combination of NVMe architecture, a PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 interface, Phison PS5007-E7 controller and Toshiba 15mn MLC NAND. There are three drive capacities in the range; the flagship 480GB drive being joined by 120GB and 240GB models.

All three models have the same quoted Sequential Read/Write performance; 3,000MB/s and 2,400MB/s respectively. There is a difference between the two larger capacity drives and the smallest when it comes to the quoted random 4K performance. The 480GB and 240GB drive are rated as up to 250,000 IOPS for reads and up to 210,000 IOPS for writes. The 120GB drive IOPS figure drops a lot lower than these at up to 150,000 IOPS for reads and up to 90,000 IOPS for writes. These figures are for the drive being tested at a Queue Depth of 32.

Although there is no mention of any encryption support in the specifications of the MP500, the PS5007-E7 controller does support AES-256 bit encryption so this feature may be enabled in the drive in the future with a firmware update.

Corsair quote a TBW endurance figure for the 480GB drive of 698TB and back the MP500 with a 3-year warranty.

Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 480GB
NAND Components: Toshiba 15mn MLC
Interface: PCIe Gen3.0 x4 (NVMe)
Form Factor: 2260 M.2
NAND Controller: Phison PS5007-E7
Dimensions: 22 x 80 x 4.7mm
Drive Weight: 13g

Firmware Version: E7FM02.1

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