Corsair MP600 Elite review: "Managed to scrape past the read speeds of the FireCuda 530"

Apr. 16, 2024

A new rival joins the top PS5 SSD battle royale! The Corsair MP600 Elite gives Samsung, WD Black, and Seagate a run for their money with this top-performing drive. It’s pretty good value for a new SSD too.

Great Gen 4 speeds

Works well in a PS5

Beautiful design and a great heatsink

Competitively priced (at the time of writing)

Hybrid Gen 5 SSDs may offer more futureproofing

Heatsink is slightly chunky

The MP600 LPX may be more affordable

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Just as Gen 5 SSDs are starting to steal the limelight, theCorsairMP600 Elite has pulled my focus back to the last-gen race. Gen 5 compatibility is still extremely limited unless you buy an up-to-date motherboard, and in all honesty, those drives are a bit ahead of their time. Fortunately, top-rate Gen 4 performance is still bonkers, and its competitive market thanks to the PS5 is what most buyers should be concerned with.

For a while now, thebest SSDs for PS5have been three contenders that aren’t separated by much. The WD Black SN850X, the Seagate FireCuda 530, and theSamsung990 Pro all push the boundaries of what Gen 4 M.2 drives can achieve, and besides a few discrepancies and fluctuations, they’re all similarly priced. There are plenty of budget brands and smaller names in the mix, but Corsair’s MP600 range is always pushing to be seen among those top names.

The MP600 Elite is the latest update, and in my eyes, it’s boosted the brand into that upper echelon. SSDs have been getting pricier recently, and the biggest names seem happy to let their older products get more expensive. I give props to Corsair for showing some restraint with the price tag here, but mainly for making a decent SSD first and foremost. The MP600 Elite is available in 1TB form for $99 / £99, and 2TB for  ~ $150 / £150.

Design & Features

Like pretty much any of thebest SSDs for gaming, you’ll find the MP600 Elite in a few different shapes and sizes. The one I’ve tested for this review is designed for PS5 and has a beautiful white heatsink surrounding it. The PC version has a black heatsink, although appears to be the exact same as the white model you’ll see in this review’s images. If you already have one of thebest PS5 heatsinksor you’d like to rely on your motherboard’s cooling solutions, it’s also available without a heat spreader. You can find it in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, and the one I’ve been testing is a 2TB model. When formatted into Windows 11, our testing rig recognized 1.8TB, which is fairly standard for drives of this size.

I thought it couldn’t get much better than theSamsung 990 Proregarding aesthetics and heatsink design, but I have to hand it to Corsair, this is pretty close. I love the subtle curves and individual vent panels of this heatsink - it’s like a suit of armor, with separate plates slotting together to form a secure whole.

Additionally, I love how the bottom of the drive is catered to as well because there are a lot of small spaces for cool air to flow through this heatsink. This is pretty innovative compared to other PS5 SSDs I’ve tested, and besides making the device slightly chunkier in an M.2 tray, it seems to do the trick.

The MP600 Elite uses the M.2, PCIe Gen 4.0 format, but is backwards compatible with PCIe Gen 3 systems. It’s a 2280 drive, so you won’t have much trouble fitting this in any standard M.2 slot, either on a PC’s motherboard or inside the PS5. Speaking of architecture though, there’s nothing too out of the ordinary here. There’s a 3D TLC NAND cache Corsair calls “high density”, and quoted endurance of 1,200TBW (total bytes written). Luckily, the drive also comes with a 5-year warranty.

Last but not least, we come to the advertised read and write speeds for this drive. Remember, these aren’t always exactly what you’ll end up with. Depending on your system and the individual drive itself, you’ll get minor discrepancies with these numbers. Nonetheless, read/write speeds are quoted as 7,000MB/s and 6,500MB/s.

As this SSD is designed for PS5 use as well as in thebest gaming PCs, I put it to work inSony’s console first. Of course, I’ll caveat by saying the numbers recorded inside the PS5 will always be lower than optimal. This is because the PS5’s motherboard isn’t capable of diverting power to its secondary M.2 bay, which means you’ll never get the cream of the storage crop when it comes to numbers.

Nonetheless, the Corsair MP600 Elite fares well against its rivals. TheNextorage NEM-PA SSDmanaged to reach a PS5 internal benchmark of 6,539MB/s sequential read, which is pretty darn good. In all honesty, that’s one of the fastest numbers I’ve seen the PS5 recognize, and the MP600 Elite comes in just under it with 6,486MB/s. That’s even faster than last year’s dark horse in the PS5 market, theVerbatim Vi7000G, which scored 6,250MB/s. It’s certainly an improvement over the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX, an older model of this drive that the console formatted to 5,581MB/s.

Loading times weren’t half bad either but were pretty comparable to other PS5 additional storage options. The table of results below isn’t the shining example of testing methodology to quote to your SSD enthusiast friends, but it does give you some idea of how performance figures translate to loading times where the PS5 will allow it. Hunt: Showdown and GTA V are famously slow-loading games, while Outer Wilds loads in a heartbeat.

Like I say, those numbers are pretty par for the course for SSDs I’ve tested in the PS5, and definitely not the slowest numbers I’ve seen (he says, giving side-eye to theWD Black SN850P).

SSDs are more expensive year-on-year, and with the FireCuda, SN850X, and 990 Pro all proving more difficult to get a hold of, Corsair has launched a new option worth getting instead. Its pricing at 1TB and 2TB are very competitive for a new drive, and although its numbers don’t shoot for unattainable new highs in the Gen 4 market, it stands toe-to-toe with the best options.

In truth, the biggest caveats I’d offer anyone looking to buy this is that its older sibling, the MP600 Pro LPX, is still readily available, and quotes speeds that are actually better (although by all accounts it falls short of those numbers). It’s also available in 8TB and 500GB shapes, which the Elite model has forgone. Similarly, anyone looking for more futureproofing could look to more recent hybrid Gen 5 SSDs that are backwards compatible with Gen 4 systems.

In any case, the MP600 Elite is a new top contender I can recommend easily. I love its heatsink, its performance, and its price tag.

I tested the Corsair MP600 Elite inside my PS5 and our hardware team’s testing PC. I used CrystalDiskMark to test sequential read and write numbers, as well as the PS5’s own internal benchmark. I used the SSD inside the PS5 to play games, transfer files, and record loading times.

To read more about the ways we test the latest gaming gear, check out ourhardware policy.

Looking for external storage boosts instead? Check out thebest external hard drives for gaming, thebest PS5 external hard drives, and thebest Xbox Series X hard drive.

One of my earliest memories is playing SuperMario64 and wondering why the controller I held had three grips, but I only had two hands. Ever since I’ve been in love with video games and their technology. After graduating from Edinburgh Napier University with a degree in Journalism, I contributed to the Scottish Games Network and completed an Editorial Internship at Expert Reviews. Over the last decade, I’ve been managing my ownYouTube channelabout my love of games too. These days, I’m one of the resident hardware nerds at GamesRadar+, and I take the lead on our coverage of gaming PCs, VR, controllers, gaming chairs, and content creation gear. Now, I better stop myself here before I get talking about my favourite games like HUNT: Showdown, Dishonored, and Towerfall Ascension.Location: UK Remote

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