SSDs with PCIe 5.0 are not yet particularly widespread. On the one hand, this is certainly due to the price that the manufacturers charge for the new models, but on the other hand, it is also due to the lack of progress compared to the common SSDs with PCIe 4.0. The first 5.0 SSDs only achieved 10 GB/s, good 4.0s achieve 7.5 GB/s – you only notice this in a few applications. Only Crucial has a faster 5.0 SSD in its range, the T700: The company has exclusive access to the faster NAND flash from the parent company Micron, the only manufacturer of the memory necessary for such fast SSDs.
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But now more faster SSDs with PCIe 5.0 are slowly coming. Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 12000 SSD, Lexar NM1090, MSI Spatium M570 Pro FROZR, Patriot PV553 and Verbatim Vi12000 have already been announced – and the Corsair SSD MP700 Pro, which we already had for testing.
Quiet fan
Like the Adata SSD Legend 970, the MP700 Pro has a fan, but it is barely audible during operation. It doesn’t blow on the 30 millimeter high heat sink, but along it. The fan is unregulated and draws its power from a SATA connector. By the way, fans are not the idea of SSD manufacturers; The controller manufacturer Phison included a fan in its reference design.
Apart from the memory, the MP700 Pro is similar to older SSDs with PCIe 5.0: It uses the Phison E26 controller and 2 GB of DRAM per TB of storage space. Even the revision number of the board matches that of other 5.0 SSDs, so the MP700 Pro is most likely manufactured by Phison. Corsair was unable to provide any information when asked.
High speed
12.4 GByte/s reading, 11.8 GByte/s writing and around 1.5 million IOPS when accessing random addresses are results we expected. In some disciplines, however, the MP700 Pro achieves higher values compared to the similar T700. PCMark 10 gives it 4935 points for its suitability as a system drive, an increase of around 250 points compared to the T700 and the highest value we have measured to date. In the endurance test it is around 200 points ahead with 3839 points, and it completes the entire writing using H2testw with 1940 MB/s – in the latter two disciplines the Samsung 990 Pro and Adata Legend 970 are in first place
The 1 TB version is a little slower, according to the information it manages 11.7 GByte7s when reading, while when writing it is just under the double-digit limit at 9.6 GB/s. The smaller version is also a little slower when accessing random addresses, but you won’t notice this in practice.
The MP700 is available with 1 and 2 TB of storage space and with and without a heat sink, and there is also a 2 TB version for Corsair’s Hydro X Series cooling system. The official prices start at 220 euros, the 2 TB version should cost 365 euros. The surcharge for the cooled versions is 15 to 20 euros. Our price comparison already lists the SSDs as available; the prices are 202 and 333 euros for the versions without heat sinks. For comparison: the T700 with 2 TB costs around 340 euros without a heat sink.
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