Corsair is no stranger to the SSD market. Though their products have been targeting mainstream (and occasionally lower enthusiast) levels, the company seems to be seeking to up the ante with their newest drive.
An addition to their Force Series, the MP500 SSD adds NVMe support -- a first for the company's drives -- courtesy of another Phison controller, the Phison PS5007-E7. 120 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB models come from this new series, hitting three of the most common capacity points seen in the market today. And to help back up the performance, the drive gets 256 MB of RAM per 120 GB of capacity (likely to store mapping table information).
Operating over a PCIe 3.0 x4 link, the drive is expected to get peak sequential reads of 3,000 MB/s & peak sequential writes of 2,4000 MB/s [according to Corsair's tests with the ATTO synthetic benchmark].
Contrary to the flat read/write figures with ATTO, CrystalDiskMark shows that the smaller drive is capable of 2,300 MB/s & 1,400 MB/s (respectively), while the larger two sizes pull a respectable 2,800 & 1,500 MB/s (read/write).
In keeping with CrystalDiskMark's results, the smallest capacity is said to manage 150K IOPS (read) and 90K IOPS (write), whereas the larger two capacities get 250K IOPS (read) and 225K IOPS (write). Thermal constraints of the diminutive form factor (it's an M.2 2280 drive) as well as both internal and external overhead are likely to further reduce real world performance numbers, but even with those limitations the drive seems to be a promising option.
As for the price? MSRP for the 120/240/480 GB drive is $109.99 / $169.99 / $324.99 (respectively) in U.S. dollars. It seems the drives are priced to be competitive, but we will have to wait & see just how competitive the drives actually are once they reach users' hands.
[source: Corsair]
