Corsair MP700: PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD But Not Without Issues

For an early look at the Corsair MP700 performance on Ubuntu 23.04, the PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD was tested from a Ryzen 9 7950X3D system with an ASRock X670E PG Lightning motherboard from its PCIe 5.0 M.2 connector. For getting an idea as to the performance the Corsair MP700 2TB was tested against the Inland TD510 PCIe 5.0 SSD 2TB, Samsung 980 PRO 2TB, and a WD_BLACK SN850 1TB. The WD_BLACK SN850 continues to serve as a great solid-state drive in many of my test systems that is performant and works well under Linux -- compared to say the Samsung SSDs continuing to have issues on Linux with database workloads.

Ubuntu 23.04 with its Linux 6.2 kernel and an EXT4 file-system with default mount options was used for all testing.

When it came to sequential reads with FIO, the PCIe 5.0 SSDs do perform well... Both of the PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs were at around 9.3k MB/s.

The MP700 sequential write performance was below the 10k MB/s rating from Corsair but at least ahead of the Inland TD510 and well ahead of the PCIe 5.0 NVMe comparison drives freshly re-tested.

The Corsair MP700 was operating very warm while running these benchmarks even with the motherboard-provided passive NVMe SSD heatsink. The Inland TD510 with its integrated active cooler was leading to much lower operating temperatures.

With the MariaDB MySQL server running on this PCIe 5.0 SSD, the performance was disappointing like with the Inland TD510... The WD_BLACK SN850 was performing much better than these early PCIe 5.0 SSDs for this common database workload. At least these PCIe 5.0 SSDs outperformed the Samsung 980 PRO that has known issues with Linux database workloads.

The MP700 was operating much warmer than all of the other tested SSDs while running the MariaDB benchmark.

Or for a simpler database workload and more common to desktops was SQLite. But even with SQLite, the WD_BLACK SN850 on Ubuntu Linux was still delivering much better performance than either of these PCIe 5.0 SSDs.