One of the fastest SSDs you don’t need

PCIe 5.0 SSDs are starting to become all the rage, even despite the heating issues that they face severely throttling their capabilities. When it came to PCIe 4.0 SSDs, Samsung’s 990 Pro was king for most of the time, except for when the Corsair MP600 Pro showed up. That dethroned Samsung’s top spot, and now Corsair is back with the MP700, a PCIe 5.0 SSD. It may not be as significant as the MP600 Pro was, but it’s certainly still a good SSD.

The Corsair MP700 achieves up to 10GB/s read and write speeds in its 2TB variant, putting it in the front row of the fastest SSDs that you can buy today. It gets really hot, which we can only assume is thanks to its power draw. It’s a great SSD in isolation, but unless you’re an enthusiast or work in data-heavy workloads, nobody really needs this SSD.

About this review: The Corsair MP700 was purchased by XDA Developers for the purposes of this review. Corsair did not have any input into the contents of this review.

Corsair MP700: Pricing and availability

The Corsair MP700 has two different storage sizes of 1TB and 2TB, but these are also slightly different products in their specifications. The 1TB model has a TBW of 700, whereas the 2TB model has 1400. The 1TB model will set you back $160, whereas the 2TB model will set you back $250. They’re pretty high price tags, but that’s what you get when it comes to being among the first PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

As for availability, you can buy the Corsair MP700 now from most tech stores.

Testing environment

The Corsair MP700 was tested in a test bench sporting an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Dark Hero motherboard, Intel Core i9-14900K processor, 32GB of RAM, and the SSD was installed under the motherboard’s SSD heat sink. You’ll need a heatsink for PCIe 5.0 SSDs, as they run very, very hot.

We used CrystalDiskMark and ATTO Benchmark for this review, as while they don’t simulate real-world usage necessarily, they are great at showing the theoretical limits of a storage device. We waited between tests to ensure that the cache was flushed appropriately.

Performance

CrystalDiskMark and ATTO Benchmark

We’re testing the 1TB model of the Corsair MP700, and Corsair guarantees at least 9500MB/s read and 8500MB/s write. These scores are very much in line with what we expect to see based on the tech specs and are only possible thanks to the enhanced capabilities of PCIe 5.0. These are blazingly fast, and the random read speeds are the most important as those are the most commonly used in a PC, especially if you’re playing games on your PC.

ATTO Benchmark shows the strong performance of this SSD, topping out at just shy of 9GB/s read speed in higher I/O sizes. Different I/O sizes allow for a greater understanding of how the SSD responds to read requests looking for different types of data. For example, if you were watching a movie (where the file is stored in one continuous stream), the movie, in data terms, would be located all in one place. That means the system can fetch larger chunks of data every time it reads. Therefore, when fetching chunks of 8MB, the Corsair MP700 can transfer up to 8.96GB of data per second.

What this all means is that you’ll get some pretty good performance out of this SSD, and it’ll be perfect for games and the like that transfer large amounts of data constantly. You may not notice a huge difference coming from a PCIe 4.0 SSD on your gaming PC, but it’s a solid upgrade if you’re coming from any other kind of storage medium.

Should you buy the Corsair MP700?

You should buy the Corsair MP700 if:

• You have appropriate cooling
• You need one of the fastest SSDs on the market

You shouldn’t buy the Corsair MP700 if:

• You’re just a regular gamer, then get a PCIe 4.0 SSD instead
• You don’t have adequate cooling
• You want to save money

The Corsair MP700 is not for everyone. In fact, we wouldn’t even recommend it in general. It’s a good product in the confines of what PCIe 5.0 SSDs can be, but in a broader market filled with SSDs that are more affordably and require less cooling, this becomes a much harder sell. It’s a high-quality SSD with a great warranty behind it in its own right, but if the warranty is the clincher for you, then you can get something like the Corsair MP600 Pro NH (or any of the other best SSDs) and it’ll get the job done too. Even that’ll need some cooling too, though.

Source: Corsair

Corsair MP700 PCIe Gen5

An enthusiast’s SSD

The Corsair MP700 PCIe Gen5 SSD is rated for up to 9,500MB/s read speeds and 8,500MB/s write speeds, with up to 1.6 million 4KB random write IOPS. That’s pretty speedy, with a five-year warranty to back it up.