Corsair MP700 Pro 2TB PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Review

The Corsair MP700 Pro is pretty special, as not only is it the fastest SSD Corsair has ever released, but it's also set to be the fastest we've ever reviewed, as it's our very first PCIe Gen 5.0 drive! Featuring blistering read and write speeds of up to 10,000 MB/s and a choice of 1TB or 2TB capacities, it can more than meet the demands of a high-end PC user. The older MP600 Pro XT maxed out at around 7100 MB/s, so this is a pretty significant upgrade in terms of speed. However, this even more extreme "Pro" version adds more speed, a big cooler, and promises to exceed that performance by quite a significant margin. Corsair MP700 Pro 2TB Pro Even cooler than the super-speed of this drive is that we have the even more premium Pro version. The "standard" version comes with just the M.2 drive ready to drop into your motherboard. However, this Pro version comes with a SATA-powered NMVe heatsink and fan combo to ensure the drive can operate at its optimum efficiency and higher-rated read and write speeds. While you may not think that a cooler is needed, we know that these flagship drives can easily hit 100c+ if left without additional cooling, which would result in a drop in performance, so a big cooler is pretty much essential to keep those read-and-write speeds at their peak. Features Gen5 Performance Powered by NVMe 2.0: PCIe Gen5 x4 combines with the massively high-bandwidth NVMe 2.0 interface to unleash higher-speed data transfers and greater M.2 SSD performance than ever before. Your PC Made Faster: Load games, boot Windows, and manage large files with unprecedented speed, reaching up to 10,000MB/sec sequential read and 9,500MB/sec sequential write speeds. *Performance and endurance vary by capacity. High-Density 3D TLC NAND: Provides the ideal mix of performance and endurance to keep your drive performing at its best for years. Microsoft DirectStorage: Enables the MP700 to communicate directly with your graphics card when playing compatible games, for unbelievably fast load times. *DirectStorage requires a DirectX12 GPU with Shader Model 6.0 support. Backward Compatible: Support for PCIe Gen4 and Gen3 systems. *Reduced performance on PCIe Gen4 and Gen3. What Corsair Had to Say Harness the power of Gen5 SSD technology with NVMe 2.0 to enable faster read and write times, built with high-density 3D TLC NAND flash memory. PCIe Gen5 x4 combines with the massively high-bandwidth NVMe 2.0 interface to unleash higher-speed data transfers and greater M.2 SSD performance than ever before. Packaging & Accessories The box looks great and uses that combination of black, and yellow and a triangular texture and pattern that we see across the whole Corsair range these days. There's a clear photo, and all the main read/write speeds are detailed right on the front of the box too, promising speeds of up to 12400 MB/s, and 11800 MB/s read and write. Around the back, it's largely just warranty information and barcodes. The drive is well packaged, with protective foam on all sides for the drive, heatsink, and attached cable. The cable is SATA and is simply to provide power for the fan that is built into the heatsink. This does mean the fan is either on or off, it's not PWM controlled, but was the best solution to ensure the efficiency of the drive. A Closer Look It's a fairly unassuming thing really, with a carbon black finish, and no RGB or bright writing, it's just very neat and tidy. but make no mistake, relative to the size of an M.2 drive, this heatsink is pretty thick, with a tower of chunky aluminium fins and air channels running the entire length of the drive. While on the other end, there's a tiny active fan that can push air through the drive, ensuring heat is very quickly dissipated, and your performance is unaffected. The drive uses the latest PCIe Gen5 x4 standards, so will largely be compatible with most modern high-end motherboards and PCIe expansion cards. With NVMe 2.0, the read and write speeds can easily be more than 10,000 MB/s, so it's anything but slow. Corsair is using 512GB High-Density 3D TLC NAND memory chips, and as you can see, this drive has two of them on this side, and two on the reverse, giving us our 2TB total. It's also powered by the latest Phison E26 controller, their first PCIe 5.0 controller. Finally, it also features 4 GB of Hynix LPDDR4-4266 DRAM. Preparation The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn’t used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system. Data We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various fillage scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. The drive will be tested empty and at 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage for this area. We’re using Anvil’s Storage Utilities and CrystalDiskMark for this part of the review. Hardware Processor: Intel Core i9 12900K Graphics Card: XFX Speedster RX 6800 XT MERC Motherboard: ROG MAXIMUS X690 EXTREME RAM: Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5200Mhz 32GB(2x16GB) Storage: Seagate FireCuda 530 PCIe Gen 4 2TB M.2 (Primary Drive) Power Supply: NZXT C1000 Gold Case: NZXT H7 Flow Cooling: NZXT Kraken Z73 RGB Software CrystalDiskMark Anvil’s Storage Utilities ATTO Benchmark Windows 11 64-bit When it comes to ultra-fast performance, nothing we've tested comes close to what this drive has to offer. We knew it would be fast, but wow. The box promised speeds of up to 12400 MB/s Read and 11800 MB/s Write, and we got remarkably close to what was expected, but obviously, your mileage may vary depending on your other system hardware, such as CPU, RAM, or even your OS. For IOPS, again, absolutely ridiculous numbers, with over 11000 in read and write using SEQ1M, but overall, still by far the largest numbers we've seen on a consumer drive in CDM. Anvil pushed this drive pretty hard, and as you can see, the IOPS are through the roof, with 4K QD16 over 300,000 IOPS. Response times are exceptionally low, no doubt thanks to that fantastic new controller and the large DRAM cache for the lookup tables. The drive deals with smaller files surprisingly well, and can exceed the fastest PCIe Gen 4 drives from around 128KB files and upwards, and gets to its full speed by the time we move to 2-4MB files, which is great news if you move around thousands of smaller files. As you can see, there was no drop off in performance as the test continued either, meaning that cooler is more than up to the job. I've only just seen my software was set to German for some reason, but the tests are done, and again we can see that Sequential read and writes are superbly fast, with 8857 in read and 9431 in write, with a very low latency of just 0.011 ms. The long and short of it is, you'll have to Google loading screen tips, as they'll be flashing up like subliminal messages. For the more demanding Copy test, again we see killer performance, hitting around 5214.05 MB/s or about half the overall drive performance given the other half with be going to reading the file that is being copied. Again, IOPS reached extremely high numbers in 16MB, 4K, 4K-64Thrd, and 512B reads and writes, resulting in an incredible score of 15108 points. This is the first time I've run the AJA Video Systems Benchmark, so I don't have any comparison to make, however, as you can see, it easily reached nearly 10,000 MB/s in both read and write using a simulated 5K Red camera 1GB test file. If you do plan to use this drive for high-resolution, high-refresh-rate video capture, it's more than up to the job. Finally, we have the Passmark score of 5458, again, this is the highest I've seen, and response and loading times are extremely low, but again, we wouldn't have expected anything less. How Much Does it Cost? The Corsair MP700 2TB M.2 PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD/Solid State Drive is available on Scan for just £275.99 and comes with read and write speeds of 10,000 MB/s. Scan also includes a Free Xclio iCold-007 Pro Low Profile M.2 Heat Sink worth £9.99. However, if you want the Pro version, which we tested today, and which runs both faster, and comes with its more premium heatsink, then it is a little more expensive at £204.99 for the 1TB and £339.99 for the 2TB with the air cooler. However, you can get it without the heatsink for £194.99 and £319.99 respectively, and again with the Hydro X liquid cooling system, only available as the 2TB version for £339.99. Overview This is one of the easiest reviews I've written in a while, as it's just so damn good, that I have nothing to pick fault with. I mean, I guess I could argue that it is expensive, and I'm sure we would all buy one if it were a lot cheaper, but at the end of the day, you get what you pay for. Corsair promised flagship performance, and that's exactly what it delivered. What I am surprised by is just how close we got to the theoretical maximum speed of the drive. Choices like what CPU you are using, your RAM speed, the quality and features of your motherboard, and even the overall ambient temperature can all affect drive performance, but we pretty much maxed out the drive on every benchmark run without fail. Of course, I suspect the powerful included cooler has a lot to do with this. Keeping a drive like this cool is not easy, they can easily get to 100c+ with sustained read and writes. Unless your motherboard has a decent heatsink system, or you have your own aftermarket cooling, I strongly suggest using the cooler that comes with the Pro version, as it's very good at what it does. The only downside of the cooler is it is rather chunky, so it wouldn't fit in a laptop or console for example. Overall though, it really is the sum of its parts, with the latest Gen 5 E26 controller from Phison, four 512GB High-Density 3D TLC NAND, and 4GB Hynix DRAM, all of which make it one of the most powerful and feature-packed SSDs to ever hit the market. Should I Buy One? It may not be cheap, but it's pretty much the hyper-car of the storage world right now. If you want your games to load in record time, faster system booting, or even just deal with large file transfers for your workstation, video edition and game development, it really is a huge performance increase, even for those coming from a fast Gen4 drive, the performance upgrade is pretty significant.