Specifications & Features

Specifications and features

The sample that has arrived for testing is a 480GB version of the drive. The series as stated will be fitted with TLC (Triple-level cell written) written NAND flash memory from Toshiba. This allows them to offer the big storage volume at a lower price point.  In 3D NAND, NAND layers, not chips, are stacked in a single IC. The good news is continued cost reduction, smaller die sizes and more capacity per NAND chip. Also, installed NAND toolsets in the wafer fabs can, for the most part, be reused, thereby extending the useful life of the fab equipment.

The NAND ICs are driven by a Phison 5008-E8 controller as well as a DRAM cache and a small partition that will be SLC written to keep write performance up-to-snuff. Much like other competitors, this M2 SSD will run on a slower PCIe x2 link. The MP300-series is to be a cheaper, more budget offering of their NVMe SSDs. SSD solutions like these still will get your performance ranges of up to 1600 MB/s and writing speeds of up to 1080 MB/s, though the numbers vary per model due to available NAND channels to the controller (big SSDs have more chips to work with). In the end, these more value propositions offer double and even triple the speed (depending on how you look at it) of the fastest SATA3 SSD. 

MP300	120GB	240GB	480GB	960GB
Sequential reads	1520 MB/s	1580 MB/s	1600 MB/s	1600 MB/s
Sequential writes	460 MB/s	920 MB/s	1040 MB/s	1080 MB/s
Writing Random QD32	110k IOPS	180k IOPS	200k IOPS	210k IOPS
Read Random QD32	80k IOPS	110k IOPS	220k IOPS	240k IOPS

Corsair will offer the MP300 series are fitted with vertical stacked (3D) NAND from Toshiba, written as TLC and these units receive a proper 5-year warranty.