As Corsair is a more enthusiast orientated company than, the more business orientated, Micron it should come as no surprise that their taste in color pallet, fonts, and pretty much everything else aesthetic related is more aggressive in nature. We personally prefer a more reserved appearance but there is no denying that this shipping container is going to grab one’s attention on retail shelves and do so without causing epileptic seizures in a random passersby. Put another way, it may be a touch aggressive but we would not call ‘immature’. That is actually a rather difficult balancing act to get right and yet Corsair did indeed knock it out of the park. So much so we can honestly say that this is a downright pretty box.
Make no mistake. It is not just a pretty face and has all the knowledge you could ask for backing it up – ironically… on the back of the box. This combination means that it is not only attention getting, but able to keep your attention once it has gotten it. These days few can pull that off, but Corsair are arguably the masters at doing just that.
Opening it up we can see that while the exterior is going to radically differ from the (main / T705) competition, the internals are pretty much what everyone is using. That is to say a good thermo-molded ‘clamshell’ style plastic protective layer that is not heat-sealed. Rather the box itself will keep the top half from popping open in transit. While not quite up the same double layer of plastic protection the Crucial T705 comes with this defense in depth design is more than enough to satiate all but the most OCD of buyers. We would have very little worries over it safely being shipping across a continent, an ocean, or even just across town. Just understand that if you, or the shipping agent, gets a wee too slicey-dicey when opening up the box this box comes in… you may be in for a bad day.
Moving on. In a rather interesting twist Corsair does not offer the MP700 Pro SE in two variants but three. No. We do not mean 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacity options and instead are referring to the OEM cooling options Corsair offers. As you can see, we have the non-heatsink option; then there is an actively cooled OEM-heatsink variant (that comes equipped with an integrated 20×10 / 2010’ish looking axial fan and not radial fan), then there is a water cooled ‘HydroX’ variant… that actually makes a lot of sense from both a cooling (as we are talking about 11.5 watts of heat output) and custom builder point of view.
While we do think that the HydroX represents the best value (and ease of use) for custom water loops, of the three the nekkid variant is going to be the most flexible. Afterall, one can pick up a similar radial (or axial if looking for lower profile) aftermarket cooling solution for about 15 canuck-bucks on everyone’s favorite slow version of Amazon (aka Aliexpress). Alternatively, for not much more, a bigger… better M.2 cooler like the Thermalright HR-10 Pro (if you want a lower noise 3010 actively cooled, tower radiator solution) or HR-09 Pro (if you want a silent, passively cool tower radiator heatsink) can also be found for about the same; for a lot more, you can even (if you look hard enough) find water cooling M.2 2280 compatible heatsinks; or lastly, you can even use the nekkid version with your motherboard’s existing “integrated” M.2 heatsinks. Just make sure to use it with something as PCIe 5.0 drives do run hot – and in a nice touch Corsair includes a helpful warning sticker to that effect with every non-heatsink version.
Peeling back the label we can see that Corsair has gone above and beyond for even the nekkid variants. We say this as the top label is the typical foil impregnated / multiple layer “heat spreader” label. However, instead of the usual (at best) mediocre Thermal Interface Adhesive (TIA) or (worse still) “double sided tape” options that most use, the MP700 PRO SE designers have opted for legit TIM paste. Specifically this pasted like TIM appears to be a variant of Honeywell’s (sadly, not their Phase Change pads but instead) silicone & ceramic based TIM/TIA. We say this as it is thick and has the feel of Honeywell’s enterprise TIMs we have used in the past. Whether this is correct or not this thermal adhesive is some of the best TIM we have ever seen used to attach a label to a consumer grade M.2. It does make a difference… and when paired with a proper M.2 cooling solution is good enough that we did not feel the need to remove said label and direct attach heat pads to the PCB. Color us impressed to say the least.
Moving on. Beyond this pleasant surprise the MP700 Pro SE is pretty much what we would expect a flagship, enthusiast grade NVMe PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 to come with. That is to say a pair of 4GB SK-HYNIX LPDDR4-4266 RAM ICs (or the same 2GB per TB as what Micron uses on their T705 series) for the off-chip / on the PCB cache. Two sides worth of MICRON’s fantastic B58R Replacement Gate CuA TLC NAND to 24000MT/s B58R Replacement Gate CuA TLC NAND. All connected to a PHISON E26 controller.
As we went over recently in the Crucial T705 review, this is an extremely potent combination. One that all but assures tip top performance. So much performance that 1 vs 2 vs 4TB concerns are going to be splitting hairs… as all three are extremely fast. Yes. All three will crush most real-world scenarios and only in synthetic testing will one notice a ‘massive’ difference between any three of the typical capacity options. Which probably explains why Corsair has only a 2TB and 4TB options available right now for this “Special Edition”. At some point a 1TB’er will probably be released but right now the ‘SE’ only comes in ‘big’ and ‘bigger’ capacity options.
The only issue we have with this configuration of components is the controller is the weakest link and the world has to wait on either PHISON releasing a new generation of PCIe 5.0 controllers or SMI gets off the stick and releases their take on enthusiast grade controllers. In the meantime, and for those that have not read our previous reviews, the reason we say this is because this new high performance NAND is being bottlenecked by the E26 controller.
Let us say that again. Eight channels of this new NAND can saturate the best available (consumer / home user) PCIe 5.0 controller. Easily saturate it. This is why all the cutting edge M.2’s using them are ‘only’ rated for 14GBps and not the 15.5GBps that four PCIe 5.0 lanes can handle. It is also why PHISON recommends and, just like Micron, Corsair has opted for so much high-performance RAM cache… and it still is not enough to fully harness this new gen of NAND. It just helps minimize how often you will notice this bottleneck in the real-world. A bottleneck that in fact will not be removed until PCIe 6.0 becomes a reality… as eight channels of this NAND should be good for about 19.2GB/s.
Thankfully, sequential speed is only one metric used to show how ‘fast’ a M.2 drive is. In fact, a better metric is not sequential performance (as the R/W completion speed for most files will be a rounding error when measured in hundredths of a second). It is IOPS. Specifically small file IOPS that make a bigger impact. Here the MP700 PRO SE rocks a massive 1.7 Million I/O operations per second of reads and an extremely impressive 1.6 Million In/Out operations per second rating. Which is technically lower than some other’s 2TB version, but is the same as the MP700 Pro SE 2TB’s rating. Which is a first. A first where Corsair is being more conservative than Crucial. Now that is being conservative and ‘under promising but over-delivering’!
Circling back to the E26’s shortcomings, it may indeed be the best choice going right now… but even 1.7 Million IOPS is not what the B58R can truly do. We will not know that until we get a replacement. However, that is kicking a dead horse and does not explain why the controller is the weak link in all existing PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 drives.
The reason for this is a bit complicated but it is not because the controller is being saturated per se. Instead it has more to do with how much electricity the controller needs to consume to hit a given IOPS rating… and it is a bit of a power hog. It is a power hog because the E26 was originally designed around the enterprise market’s “U.3” standard (about 25 watts on the low end) and not the consumer market’s M.2 (15 watts on the extreme high end). Yes. Phison’s design team did compensate for this lowered TDP via only including two ‘big’ ARM Cortex R5 cores and not three found in the E18. Yes. They then helped increase performance by upping the ‘little’ (32bit RISC-V AndesCore N25F based) CoXProcessor 2.0 co-processors count from two to three. This however severely curtails how much the E26 can process at a given time. Which it turns out is less than what a PCIe 5.0 x4 bus can handle.
Furthermore, as they are electrical engineers, the E26 team further toned things down via the use of the “80 percent rule” and thus never let the E26 full board / package consumption go above 80 precent of this generations theoretical power limit. Making a 25 watt controller has to make do with only about 10 watts of power (as this gens 11.5 watt safety limit has to include power for the NAND too). Which is a massive underclock to say the least.
Thus our statement that this underlying bottleneck will not be resolved until the E26 is replaced and Phison get TSMC to use a smaller than 12nm node size for their future E-series… or SMI or some other company come along and eats PHISON’s lunch like PHISON did to SandForce back in the good old days of SATA SSDs.
To be candid, this ‘issue’ is a good one to have and we sincerely doubt the average enthusiast is ever going to be unhappy with such gobsmackingly large amounts of performance a ‘stick of gum’ sized SSD can now offer. Especially when Corsair is, rightly in our opinion, using a ‘floating’ pseudo-SLC cache configuration that basically uses up about 70’ush percent of the free NAND cells for its write buffer. To put that another way. This 4TB’er drive can handle nearly 450GB worth of writes in one go without exhausting its pseudo-SLC buffer when empty, and when at 90percent full will still have a pSLC write cache buffer in the high 30s low 40GB range. Which is quite frankly more than enough for the home-user and makes this one of the very, very… very few SSDs where buyers can fill it nearly all the way to capacity and not really notice any ‘slow downs’. Color us extremely impressed.
Overall the Corsair MP700 Pro SE lives up to both its Professional and Special Edition monikers as it has set the bar awfully darn high. So high it is going take a nice while before one will be able to buy a ‘faster’ large capacity M.2 SSD than what it offers right now.
