Corsair MP400 NVMe SSD Review: 1TB Tested

Corsair MP400 – Low Cost QLC NAND Flash NVMe SSD

Corsair announced the MP400 NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 SSD series today and you should take a second to look at what it brings before writing it off as just another Gen3 storage drive. The Corsair MP400 is powered by Phison’s E12S controller and paired with Micron’s latest 96-Layer QLC NAND Flash. This high density QLC NAND allows the MP400 to enter the market in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and a massive 8TB model!

Pricing stating at just $119.99 for the 1TB drive, which is rather affordable when it comes to Suggested Retail Pricing as that is just $0.12 per GB. For those that are looking for more storage space the 2TB drive is $264.99, the 4TB is $609.99 and the 8TB monster will set you back $1,379.99. Having an 8TB NVMe SSD is out of the reach for most, but they are finally available for those that need one!

When it comes to sequential performance the Corsair MP400 series delivers speeds up to 3480 MB/s read and 3000 MB/s write. Random 4K performance peaks at 610,000 IOPS read and 710,000 IOPS write. These numbers are respectable for a Gen3 drive here in 2020!

You won’t find AES 256-bit hardware encryption on the MP400, but it does support the TRIM command and the latest garbage collection technologies to ensure the drive runs optimally. It also features a dynamic SLC cache that is pretty significant in size at about 25% of the drives total capacity. That means the 8TB drive has up to 2TB of space allocated for its dynamic SLC cache. Even the ‘tiny’ 1TB drive gets 250GB of space for the dynamic SLC cache and that is pretty respectable.

All Corsair MP400 drives are backed by a 5-year warranty and have endurance ratings of 200 TBW for the 1TB model, 400 TBW on the 2TB, 800 TBW on the 4TB and 1600 TBW on the 8TB drive. For normal consumer use these ratings are nothing to worry about and the drives 5-year warranty should give you peace of mind.

Corsair sent over the MP400 1TB NVMe SSD for us to test on our AMD Ryzen X570 platform. The part number on the drive that we received was CSSD-F1000GBMP400 for those that are curious. The packing is similar to the other Corsair NVMe SSDs like the MP510 and MP600 models.

Inside the box you’ll find the drive along with a paper guide that covers the basics.

The Corsair MP400 1TB and 2TB models are single-sided M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs whereas the larger 4TB and 8TB models are double-sided. All feature a black PCB and black label, so they should go great with any gaming system build!

The back of our MP400 1TB model is bare besides another label that contains information about the drive.

We peeled back the sticker off the top of the drive to see exactly what Corsair was using. Here you can see the Phison PS5012-E12S 8-channel controller. This controller is made on the 12nm manufacturing process by TSMC is is the latest PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe controller from Phison.

Below the controller you’ll find four Micron 1Tb 96-Layer QLC NAND Flash chips and ours were labeled IA5BG66AWA. Above the controller is one 4Gb NANYA DDR3L DRAM cache chip that was marked NT5CC256M16ER-EK.

Let’s take a look at the test system and then show you how the Corsair MP400 did on a bunch of different performance tests!