Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
If you are on the lookout for something a bit spicier then that SATA3 SSD of yours, but feel that 3000 MB/sec and its accompanying prices are a bit out of your range, then the MP300 might be a perfect alternative. Also, the people that have occupied it's primary PCIe x3 M2 slot and have only a PCIe Gen 3 x2 lanes available, hey that's where this unit gets a proper chance and can make a lot of sense. The MP300 simply does not disappoint, and if you feel that 1.6 GB sec reads and 1 GB/s writes are not enough, well then I will not be able to convince you otherwise. At its current price level, the MP300 makes sense, as well as being covered by a proper 5-year warranty.
The Phison 5008-E8 controller was designed for one purpose, to offer a price competitive solution at PCIe Gen 3 while utilizing just two lanes, pair that with some TLC and added DRAM cache and there you have it. The 240 GB model sits at €79, our tested 480 GB model at €149,- so that's spot on that 30 cents per GB marker and remember, these are NVMe 1.3 and M.2. performance levels, just not that enthusiast class and certainly not SATA3 performance.
Performance wise theMP300 offers what is advertised. It won't kick the 960 series proverbial toosh but it certainly is a fast device, especially when compared to regular SATA3 SSDs you nearly will have tripled performance (depending on the workload). Remember, to fully utilize the performance that is offered for NVMe you need a supporting infrastructure and this a motherboard with PCI Express Gen3 (x2) interface and NVMe ready BIOS to fully utilize the bandwidth this product needs. NVMe based storage is one the most exciting technologies that we have been following developments closely over the past few years was obviously the development curve of NAND flash-based storage technology. We moved from a "blistering fast" 100 MB/sec towards numbers that are 20 to 30 fold of that. Next to that prices have been coming down, reliability has been top notch and ever so importantly volume sizes have moved upwards to a level where now 500 GB to 1 TB SSDs are getting a norm slowly. The current new mainstream, however, is roughly 480 and 512 GB which offers a nice balance in between performance and value.
Performance
Overall this x2 lane configured unit and pretty much any, any new M.2. storage unit running NVMe 1.3 is fast, really fast even coming from an HDD and lower end SATA3 SSD. The sustained and linear performance is good. For writes we did notice a TLC write hole after roughly writing 30GB continuously full speed. The perf dropped to 500 MB/sec there. IOPS performance is exceptionally good on this unit, easily upwards to 200K reads and on writes. This SSD writes and reads serious amounts of tiny files in a very fast fashion. We stated it before though, IOPS is not something you as a consumer should worry about too much unless you are doing a lot of database related work or create similar workloads on your PC, but this SSD certainly ranks high within this aspect.
Our trace tests also show really good perf, right there in the middle of Enthusiast class NVMe and that SATA3 SSD. Overall the series is impressive. Zoom in at both IOPS and trace performance and you'll notice that the SSD can manage serious workloads without breaking so much as a drop of sweat. So whether you write lots of small files simultaneously, copy big MKV movies or do it all together, this M.2 NVMe SSD remains a top dog on all fronts.
Concluding
The MP300 definitely deserves the credit of being recommended by Guru3D. The unit does as advertised and gets you a notch or two upcoming from SATA3 SSD performance, but not that enthusiast class NVMe M.2. SSD. It sits there nicely in the middle and does that really well. All boxes are checked green really, street prices hover at that 30 Cents per GB, the performance is there and Corsair backs this unit with a nice 5-year warranty as well.
The MP300 is the type of device that is easy to drop in and install and could be an excellent second M.2. unit if you only have one full PCIe Gen 3 x4 connector available. Why spend more money if your motherboard only offers x2 Lanes PCIe Gen3 right? We all know that Samsung and Micron dominate the NVMe space, so perhaps give some others a chance as well to battle the big guns like Micron and Samsung, that, however, is a difficult task to achieve. The Mp300 is a nice and solid product, in the end, pricing needs to be really competitive to make a substantial enough difference to that competition. Hardware and performance wise we can most certainly recommend the new MP300 M2 SSDs, if you are comfortable with 1600 MB/sec reads and up to 1 GB/sec writes, of course.
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