We recently shared the exciting news from Corsair announcing the immediate availability of their MP600 Mini 2230 M.2 NVMe SSD devices.
As a reminder, these are super-compact M.2 NVMe storage in 2230 format, i.e. 30mm in length – with standard width for all 22xx NVMe’s of 22mm. They are destined for use in devices such as handhelds (SteamDeck, ROG Ally etc..) but also a plethora of slim tablets such as the Microsoft Surface Pro series and some NUC’s.
The market for 2230 devices
Until now this niche (but fast-growing) market has been very poorly served. Kioxia have historically been the largest quality manufacturer of this storage format, but their BG4/5 drives are hard to obtain as an end-user. The more frequently available options are OEM Dell devices, a Kioxia re-brand, with poor warranties.
Along with limited availability, this more niche segment is also the victim of the pricing consequences of much smaller demand than for larger 2280 drives. A quick search here in France reveals prices for a 512GB unit ranging from €105 to €140, and mostly on ageing PCIe3.0x4 interfaces, with the limited speeds that entails.
NVMe heavyweight Sabrent recently began addressing this growing market with a 512GB PCIe4.0x4 unit available for €105, or €180 for the 1GB model, available since late January. Already very competitive compared to previous offerings, this works out at €0,18/GB. This is almost double the €0,10/GB cost of their larger 1TB 2280 brother.
Teamgroup recently announced their MP44S 2230 drives but no word yet on pricing or availability.
Corsair enters the game
When Corsair announced the immediate availability of their MP600 Mini PCIe4.0x4 1TB drive direct from their site for €125 including delivery we wasted little time. We now have one here to try out. It’s available in the US at an even lower price of $110 direct from Corsair.
At €0,125/GB, this represents a 30% saving off the price per GB of the closest comparable rival, the Sabrent.
So what’s in this tiny package?
[nextpage title=”Drive and Controller Specifications”]
The stats
Corsair lists the specs of this device at maximum 4800MB/s Sequential Read and Write. Here are the full specs for the drive:
Note that these are theoretical maximums, for an empty drive that is not the current system drive.
The new generation Phison controller
The controller used on this new generation of drives, including the Corsair MP600 Mini and Sabrent Rocket 2230, is the recently released Phison E21T controller – a smaller (and thereby cheaper to produce) “entry-level PCIe4” DRAM-less controller (using instead Host Memory Buffer technology) announced early in 2021. The maximum performance of the controller itself is quoted at 4800MB/s read/write, so any drive that can achieve this is maxing out the spec fully. Well-informed readers will notice this is below the maximum ~7000MB/s achievable on the PCIe4.0x4 interface (speeds that are commonly seen using the full-fat, full-size Phison E18T controller in the highest performance 2280’s) but on a par with the previous E16T controllers that appeared mid-Gen3.
Here are the full specs:
At a hardware level, the controller includes support for the usual full raft of hardware encryption protocols (for use with BitLocker, for example) and as with all of Phison’s modern offerings is Direct-Storage compatible and includes thermal monitoring. The controller supports up to 4GB of TLC or QLC NAND. In combination with highest densities already available this means we should see up to 2TB single-sides variants on the market eventually. This is important, as some devices (such as the SteamDeck, for example) support only single-sided M.2 drives.
This controller finally made its way first into an Inland drive last December, and the Sabrent Rocket 2230 has been available since late January.
The warranty
Apart from these technical specifications, the drive is covered by a 5 year warranty and is rated for 600TBW. This relatively strong guarantee mirrors the Sabrent 2230 or, for example, a 2280 Samsung 980 Pro. It’s more than double the 250TBW quoted for the upcoming 1TB TeamGroup MP44S drive.
[nextpage title=”Packaging and Contents”]
The Corsair MP600 Mini arrived on-site in suitably diminutive packaging, albeit in a larger cardboard box that took an 8-day international tour of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium before finally arriving in our hands in France. One might question the efficiency of this route, which Corsair will hopefully optimise for the European market soon, but the little drive made it safe and sound nonetheless – 9 days after placing the order.
(Please forgive the smartphone quality of the pictures used here, as this was all done on-site at the installation location.)
In the box
The small simple packaging inside is very much what you find for many NMVe drives – an ESD-safe plastic shell holding the little miracle inside an otherwise uninspiring cardboard box bearing the usual Corsair hallmarks.
Contents are sparse – the drive, the usual safety bumf, and a QR code link to the online installation guide. I’ll spare you the effort – nothing even remotely interesting or unusual to be read there. Indeed, for French readers, scanning the code delivers an unseemly 404 error as the device has not yet had its manual populated to the French sub-site – but the US manual is there if you really want it…
If not for their attention to detail on this matter, we can at least applaud Corsair for cutting down on a useless waste of paper.
The tiny powerhouse
However… Contents quantity does not mean quality and if you have never seen one of these 2230 drives in person previously, you cannot help but be amazed by the fact that this tiny stamp-sized device can hold over one million average-sized ebooks… or 100,000 lossless audio files… or 50 raw Blu-Rays… Or at least a few modern AAA game titles…
The storage density here is already impressive, but what is even more astonishing is that this NVMe is.. single-sided! We were quite shocked to find that only one side of the drive is populated with any components (and a small, thin heat-spreading label) – the back of the card is entirely bare. More on density later!
Time to put this little gem to the test…
[nextpage title=”Installation”]
An ideal use case
A recently-purchased Surface Pro 8, with a medium spec that included a paltry 256GB drive, will be the immediate beneficiary of this upgrade. Its owner quickly filled 213 of the ~230GB available. Performance has noticeably degraded as a result. In a sadly too frequent and shameful fashion, Microsoft offers no option to upgrade from a 256GB drive to 512GB or 1TB without also increasing ram and cpu specs – both of which are of course not at all user-replaceable, forcing most customers (any who don’t or can’t envisage self-upgrading) into expensive unwanted or unnecessary upgrades.
Out with the old
To Microsoft’s credit, however, the NVMe slot could not be easier to access – a paperclip and you’re in. Sadly, they chose a T4 screw to retain the drive, nothing any iFixIt kit can’t solve, but the unnecessary complication this presents compared to the almost ubiquitous Philips alternative would be a mark against Microsoft – were this a review of the Surface Pro 8 we are using here.
Your mileage may vary depending on your destination device – these days most of the products you’d be installing this type of storage into don’t make it too hard. It’s generally feasible for a complete novice to perform the operation in very little time.
Before we remove the existing 256GB Microsoft-branded drive provided with the tablet, we used imaging software to copy the current contents onto an external USBC storage. We then tested the outgoing drive performance with CrystalDiskMark, both in its current 96% full state, and again after emptying more than half the drive. More on this later!
In with the new
With the MP600 Mini safely screwed down, we replace the cover and boot to our imaging software on a USB key and copy the contents back over to the new drive.
Hey presto, job done ✅
The computer boots right back into the state we left it around 20 minutes ago – it couldn’t be easier.
On to Performance! Does the Corsair MP600 Mini deliver?
[nextpage title=”Performance”]To quickly test drive performance, we fire up Crystal Disk Mark again and shortly after complete our final set of results for comparison.
Old (tech) and tired
So, let’s begin with the near-full drive we’re replacing. It’s branded by Microsoft but is in fact a PCIe Gen3 SK Hynix device.
We include these results not just to show the performance uplift of the upgrade, but here to underline the negative effects of filling up an M.2 drive to the brim.
The first capture above shows performance measured with the old drive 96% full, and the second, below, with the drive half empty: the difference is clear. The user experience was noticeably degraded and this is clearly reflected in the numbers, particulartly in write performance. Once partially emptied, the old Gen3 SKHynix drive is back close to its theoretical maximum performance. Users should be mindful of this kind of performance degradation and be cleaning up or shopping for a larger replacement well before they reach these critical levels.
New and fresh…
Now, we compare this with our freshly installed, empty Corsair unit – NB this is still running as the OS boot drive.
There’s a substantial performance uplift in the numbers that confirm the product specifications stated by Corsair. We have of course moved from a Gen3 device, with a theoretical cap of around 3,500MB/s, to a Gen4 device whose limit would be around 7000MB/s. Here however the E21T controller maxes out around 4,800MB/S so we can see that Corsair is fully leveraging these capabilities. We have gained around 40% sequential read performance and almost tripled our sequential write speeds over the outgoing rebadged SKHynix drive Microsoft includes as standard. And, of course, quadrupled our capacity to a much healthier 1TB.
We leave our ecstatic user with his upgraded system, it’s time to wrap up.
[nextpage title=”Conclusions”]
Final thoughts
This was a field install and test of this device for a user already suffering badly from lack of capacity and reduced performance. We didn’t push our testing deeper into other metrics such as performance reduction over extended transfers, thermals or broader comparisons to other M.2 drives. The intended use of these drives specifically as OS boot drives in light workload devices such as handhelds and tablets, and the wide variance of thermal conditions they might encounter, would make such testing likely inapplicable to the precise context of any individual user.
The real performance difference between any drives using this same controller and decent NAND will be imperceptible. We will gladly revisit this drive and compare it more fully to alternatives, when reasonable ones actually exist!
The simple fact that this device is available at this price point and performs as intended will be welcomed by the millions of handheld gaming device buyers, savvy tablet and slim laptop owners, as well as many NUC users.
Corsair has arrived late but with a bang. This device is sure to shake up this segment that has badly needed more competitive offerings. We expect Sabrent to lower their prices to match these and other entrants such as TeamGroup to appear soon. Capacities should soon increase to make use of already-available IC’s to reach the single-sided 2TB and double-sided maximum 4TB limit of the ground-breaking Phison E21T controller that has made this possible. We look forward to testing them!
In the meantime, for anyone looking for one of these diminutive storage units, we heartily recommend this clear winner from Corsair (whom we applaud very loudly for shaking up this market). We suggest you grab one as quick as you can.
Update 9th May 2023: Corsair has already dropped the price by €5 to €120 and $5 to $105$ USD!!!
Corsair MP600 Mini 1TB 2230 NMVe SSD
We liked:
- The currently unbeatable price per GB
- The strong performance of the drive, perfectly suited to its intended audience
- The decent warranty
We would like:
- Broader availability in all major markets, including indirect retail channels such as Amazon etc.
- The higher capacities that are already technically possible to be brought to market
- Corsair to translate the manual for all sub sites, however simple
- Increased competition from other manufacturers to encourage further improvement of the offerings
To sum it up: this is a snappy little drive that performs as well as anything else available. It’s backed by a good warranty from a reputable company, at a significantly lower price point than the competition. Only the lengthy delivery time could justify buying anything else – they should fly off the shelves!