Corsair MP700: PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD But Not Without Issues

Last week Corsair announced the MP700 series as their first PCIe 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives. While the performance is quite speedy for sequential reads and writes, in practice this drive struggled under Linux with real-world workloads. When not adding an after-market heatsink, the MP700 was quick to exhibit EXT4 file-system errors.

The Corsair MP700 was launched in 1TB and 2TB capacities for this PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD. The 1TB version is retailing for $169 while the 2TB version is $289 USD, which is the version being tested for today's article.

The Corsair MP700 2TB is rated for up to 10,000 MB/s sequential reads and writes and up to 1.7M IOPS for 4K random writes and up to 1.5M IOPS for 4K random reads. This 3D TLC NAND solid-state drives has a reported 10.5 Watt average power consumption and is rated for 1400TBW endurance and 1.6M hours MTBF.

The 10,000 MB/s sequential reads/writes is similar to the Inland TD510 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD tested at Phoronix back in March while even faster PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs are expected to be released soon. While the Inland TD510 was equipped with a large heatsink with fan, the Corsair MP700 was not. However, it is mandated. Initially for testing I planned to first run it without any after-market heatsink just to see how warm it would get under operation... That idea quickly proved not to be wise.

I only made it to installing Ubuntu 23.04 and installing various benchmarks before the EXT4 file-system began spewing errors and went into read-only mode. When rebooting the system, at least FSCK was able to correct all of the EXT4 file-system errors. But, again, within a few minutes and just setting up the system for testing, there were more EXT4 errors.

After attaching the basic passive heatsink for the NVMe SSD that came with the ASRock motherboard and running EXT4 FSCK a last time, after that point the file-system errors went away. So it would appear that you definitely will want to plan on using at least a large passive aluminum heatsink for cooling the MP700.

Once moving past that initial headache, the performance under Linux on Ubuntu 23.04 was a mixed bag for the MP700 -- similar to the Inland TD510 performance that has been rocky for that early PCIe 5.0 SSD released in March.