Corsair’s MP600 Pro XT sets a new standard for high-end SSDs and pushes performance boundaries with up to 7.1 GBps throughput and more than 1.5 million write IOPS. Corsair also surpasses the SSD with your choice of a heatsink or waterblock for cooling, enabling high performance in even the most demanding scenarios. That means you’ll soon see this SSD on our Best SSDs list.
Corsair launched the MP600 Pro just a few months ago, but it wasn’t fast enough to remain the company’s top dog for the rest of the year. With the recent launch of Micron’s 176-Layer TLC flash, Corsair decided to revamp the MP600 Pro and bring forth a beast that performs with only the best of the best – the MP600 Pro XT.
The fastest SSDs on the market generate a lot of heat, so they can slow down when the going gets tough. However, with the MP600 Pro XT’s high speeds, you don’t have to worry about heat dissipation or throttling, as it comes in two variants that stay cool regardless of workload. Corsair’s air-cooled MP600 Pro XT has a bulky heatsink, while the Hydro X variant has a water block that you can attach to a custom water-cooling loop.
With Phison’s PS5018-E18, a controller powerhouse mated to Micron’s fastest flash, the MP600 Pro XT’s hardware matches the Seagate FireCuda 530. As expected with its premium hardware, the MP600 Pro XT doesn’t come cheap. Still, it’s well positioned: the MP600 Pro XT is much less expensive than the impressive Seagate SSD for nearly identical performance. However, it lacks the higher durability ratings and three years of data recovery services that you get with the FireCuda 530.
Specifications:
| Product | 1TB | 2TB | 4TB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-HS Pricing | $199.99 | $399.99 | $989.99 |
| HS prices | N/A | $424.99 | $999.99 |
| Capacity (User / Raw) | 1000GB / 1024GB | 2000GB / 2048GB | 4000GB / 4096GB |
| form factor | M.2 2280 | M.2 2280 | M.2 2280 |
| Interface / Protocol | PCIe 4.0 x4 / NVMe 1.4 | PCIe 4.0 x4 / NVMe 1.4 | PCIe 4.0 x4 / NVMe 1.4 |
| controller | Phison PS5018-E18 | Phison PS5018-E18 | Phison PS5018-E18 |
| drama | DDR4 | DDR4 | DDR4 |
| Memory | Micron 176L TLC | Micron 176L TLC | Micron 176L TLC |
| Sequential Read | 7,100MBps | 7,100MBps | 7,100MBps |
| Consecutive writing | 5,800MBps | 6,800MBps | 6,800MBps |
| Random reading | 900,000 IOPS | 1,000,000 IOPS | 1,000,000 IOPS |
| Random write | 1,200,000 IOPS | 1,200,000 IOPS | 1,200,000 IOPS |
| Security | AES 256-bit encryption | AES 256-bit encryption | AES 256-bit encryption |
| Endurance (TBW) | 700 TB | 1,400TB | 3,000TB |
| part number | CSSD-F1000GBMP600PXT | CSSD-F2000GBMP600PXT | CSSD-F4000GBMP600PXT |
| Guarantee | 5 years | 5 years | 5 years |
Functions
Corsair’s MP600 Pro XT is available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities with air-cooled heatsink, but the water-cooled Hydro X variants are only available in 2TB and 4TB capacities. As a result, prices come in at a premium of ~$0.20-$0.25 per gigabyte. However, the MP600 Pro XT comes with all the performance you could wish for, which justifies the price tag. Corsair rates the MP600 Pro XT to deliver up to 7.1/6.8 GBps of sequential read/write throughput and over 1,000,000/1,200,000 random read/write IOPS on heavily threaded workloads.
Corsair also backs the MP600 Pro XT with a solid warranty and above-average durability ratings compared to Samsung, WD, and Crucial SSDs. For example, our 2 TB example can absorb up to 1,400 TB of writes during the five-year warranty, but the 4 TB model can handle up to 3,000 TB. With that kind of staying power, the MP600 Pro XT shouldn’t wear out with normal use.
The high durability ratings are in part due to Phison’s SmartECC, which uses RAID-like parity, and the company’s fourth-generation LDPC ECC, which reconstructs broken pages when normal ECC fails. Other reliability features include SmartRefresh, which monitors the flash’s block ECC and periodically refreshes the blocks to maintain data retention over time, and SmartFlush, which helps preserve data in the event of a power failure in over time. minimize data expenditure in the cache.
Software & Accessories
Corsair ships its SSD Toolbox with the drive. The GUI is dated, but functions well enough to allow for advanced disk checks such as secure erase, firmware updates, overprovisioning tweaks, or simply monitoring the SSD.
A closer look
Measuring 20 x 23 x 70 mm and weighing just a hair of less than 68 grams, the aluminum heatsink of the MP600 Pro XT is much larger and heavier than that of the MP600 Pro. The design is very unique and we appreciate the dark aesthetic, including black PCB. However, the heatsink is thick, so you can’t use the drive in an M.2 slot under a GPU. Under the heatsink is a double-sided M.2 2280 SSD.
As mentioned, the Phison PS5018-E18 powering the MP600 Pro XT is a beast in its own right, but the combination with Micron’s 176-Layer replacement TLC flash is a match made for those who can’t settle for less than the Best.
Built on TSMC’s 12nm process, this eight-channel controller features a triple-core Arm Cortex R5 CPU architecture combined with a dual-CPU co-processor to ensure fast, sustained write speeds. The three main cores run at 1 GHz and generate quite a bit of heat, but stay relatively cool in standard operations thanks to a few power-saving features.
Corsair’s MP600 Pro XT supports Active State Power Management (ASPM) and Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) to reduce power during light activity or inactivity so that the SSD consumes just a few milliwatts of power instead of tens to hundreds of milliwatts. In addition, there is built-in thermal limitation. The MP600 Pro XT lowers (throttle) its performance if it gets too hot. The company says speeds will drop by 50MBps with each additional degree of heat above the 68C trigger point.
Of course, it also supports Trim, SMART data reporting and can be easily erased securely via Format NVM command to erase your data from the drive. It offers end-to-end data path protection and hardware-accelerated AES 256-bit encryption to keep your data safe too.
The MP600 Pro XT uses DRAM to ensure responsive access to the FTL mapping table. There is 1GB of SK hynix DDR4 DRAM on the 1TB model and 2GB on the 2TB and 4TB models. Thirty-two 512GB flash chips reside on our 2TB copy and all operate at the same speed of 1,200 MTps as the flash on the Seagate FireCuda 530. Each is a quad-plane replacement port architecture that uses metal-based control ports, along with a few others. design and manufacturing tweaks to improve performance and endurance.
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