Corsair MP700: PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD But Not Without Issues

With other Linux I/O benchmarks like FS-Mark and Dbench, the WD_BLACK SN850 PCIe 4.0 SSD continued exhibiting much better performance than these early PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

With other real-world Linux workloads like CockroachDB and PostgreSQL, these early PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD consumer drives continued to disappoint. The PCIe 4.0 WD_BLACK SN850 SSD continued performing much better than these new flagship drives from Inland and Corsair.

Across these workloads the Corsair MP700 was quite toasty even with the passive aluminum heatsink while the Inland TD510 with its included active heatsink had on average a lower drive temperature by about 16 degrees.

With the Corsair MP700 running into EXT4 file-system errors when simply setting up the test system without any extra heatsink, I'd be quite frightened to use this in production even with the extra heatsink. Paired with the mixed results -- namely performing poorly in real-world workloads aside from sequential synthetic tests -- and the higher PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD drive prices with being new to market, I'd hold off on upgrading to any PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD storage yet. In the coming months we'll hopefully see improved PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD products at more competitive price points, increased reliability, and hopefully performing better under Linux. Compared to the Corsair MP700 2TB at $289 USD, the WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB (an upgraded version compared to what was used in today's comparison) is ~$149 USD -- similar to other PCIe 4.0 2TB NVMe SSDs -- and can offer much more reliable performance on Linux at this time.