Corsair MP400 2TB

Lots of cache for not much cash

- JEREMY LAIRD

GEN-THREE PCIE. QLC. Up to 8TB. Five-year warranty. We give you the new Corsair MP400, summed up in soundbites. Reducing a product as complex as an SSD into a few phrases obviously isn’t the whole story, but those headline features do give you a pretty good idea of what you can expect.

Thus, this is a PCIe 3.0 rather than 4.0 drive. Consequently, Corsair pegs sequential read performance at 3,480MB/s for all variants of this drive. The 2TB version tested here, meanwhile, is said to be good for 3,000MB/s of writes. As for random 4K read performance, 380,000 IOPS is your lot with this 2TB drive, with 4K writes rated at 560,000 IOPS.

That’s all enabled by the E12S iteration of Phison’s widely used PS5012 eight-channel NAND memory controller. Of course, arguably the MP400’s defining feature is the use of QLC or quad-level NAND flash memory. The upside is more capacity for less cash compared to NAND memory, with fewer bits per cell. But as with every increase in per-cell data density, QLC memory comes at a cost in the form of lower performance and less endurance.