Corsair's PCIe 4.0 Force Series MP600 SSD Hits 4.95 GB/s

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(Image credit: Corsair)

Corsair announced its new Force Series MP600 PCIe 4.0 SSD here at Computex in tandem with AMD's third-gen Ryzen reveal and X570 motherboard launch. When paired with a PCIe 4.0-capable system, the new drive delivers up to a beastly 4,950 MB/s of sequential read speed and 4,250 MB/s of write speed, or roughly ten times the sequential performance of any SATA SSD. 

That performance comes courtesy of Phison's E16 controller, first debuting at CES 2019 which is currently the only PCIe 4.0 x4 controller on the market. Corsair paired the controller with an unspecified type of TLC flash, but we know that Phison's controller is currently only optimized for Toshiba's BiCS4 flash. (Phison will add support for Intel/Micron flash in the coming months).

You'll need to pair the SSD with a Third-gen Ryzen system to unlock the full speed of the drive, but luckily AMD is allowing vendors to enable PCie 4.0 backward compatibility with older motherboards that meet the specific criteria we've outlined here.

(Image credit: Corsair)

Corsair is rather light on the other details, such as sustained performance in heavy workloads, but the drive certainly shouldn't have throttling issues with the aggressively-styled finned heatsink. The company also isn't sharing random read and write performance, but we're sure to learn more closer to the launch in July 2019. The drive will be available worldwide through normal retail channels and carry a five-year warranty, but the company hasn't announced pricing. 

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Paul Alcorn
Paul Alcorn
Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech

Paul Alcorn is the Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.

7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • rhysiam
    How annoyed are the marketing department right now that the Engineers couldn't eek out another 50MBps!?
    Reply
  • JQB45
    Obviously 4950MBps is nice but in real world use is it going to matter compared to a drive like a current gen 970pro for a home user or even a video editor?
    Reply
  • vern72
    That is one massive heat sink! I guess this drive wasn't meant for notebooks.
    Reply
  • Math Geek
    considering most m.2 slots are between pcie slots, i'm not sure it could even be paired with an average graphics card. i guess if the m.2 slot is at the bottom of the board, then it could work but you'd likely be losing other slots nearby.....
    Reply
  • karakarga
    On a PCIe 3.0 mainboard, this one can give 4.3 GB/s read and write. (bandwidth limit) Much better than 3,5 GB/s read and 3.0 GB/s write.
    Reply
  • joevt1
    karakarga said:
    On a PCIe 3.0 mainboard, this one can give 4.3 GB/s read and write. (bandwidth limit) Much better than 3,5 GB/s read and 3.0 GB/s write.
    Where does 4.3 GB/s come from?
    PCIe 3.0 x4 = 8GT/s * 4 * 128b/130T * 1B/8b = 3.94GB/s (without considering PCIe overhead)
    Reply
  • Elikay
    JQB45 said:
    Obviously 4950MBps is nice but in real world use is it going to matter compared to a drive like a current gen 970pro for a home user or even a video editor?
    For the average home user, it probably won't do much other than take that OS load time from 10 seconds to 5 seconds, but for a video editor, especially a professional one, it can help drastically, especially if using raw footage. For standard use this drive isn't that beneficial, but for a cache, it has the potential to remove many bottlenecks for different workloads. It's most definitely not an average consumer product though and I'm sure the price will reflect that. I'd imagine it'd work similar to that of an Optane drive for most people.
    Reply