The Corsair Force MP510 SSD (960GB) Review: A High-End Contender
by Billy Tallis on October 18, 2018 10:00 AM ESTPower Management Features
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
For many NVMe SSDs, the closely related matter of thermal management can also be important. M.2 SSDs can concentrate a lot of power in a very small space. They may also be used in locations with high ambient temperatures and poor cooling, such as tucked under a GPU on a desktop motherboard, or in a poorly-ventilated notebook.
| Corsair Force MP510 NVMe Power and Thermal Management Features |
|||
| Controller | Phison PS5012-E12 | ||
| Firmware | ECFM11.0 | ||
| NVMe Version |
Feature | Status | |
| 1.0 | Number of operational (active) power states | 2 | |
| 1.1 | Number of non-operational (idle) power states | 3 | |
| Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) | Supported | ||
| 1.2 | Warning Temperature | 70 °C | |
| Critical Temperature | 90 °C | ||
| 1.3 | Host Controlled Thermal Management | Supported | |
| Non-Operational Power State Permissive Mode | Not Supported | ||
The Corsair Force MP510 implements all the usual NVMe power management features and has a comfortably high thermal throttling point. The drive's declared maximum power levels for the active power states look alarmingly high, but our testing didn't push the MP510 anywhere near the claimed 10.73W peak. The idle power states advertise low idle power with quick transition latencies, and our testing of power state 3 shows that the drive isn't exaggerating at all.
| Corsair Force MP510 NVMe Power States |
|||||
| Controller | Phison PS5012-E12 | ||||
| Firmware | ECFM11.0 | ||||
| Power State |
Maximum Power |
Active/Idle | Entry Latency |
Exit Latency |
|
| PS 0 | 10.73 W | Active | - | - | |
| PS 1 | 7.69 W | Active | - | - | |
| PS 2 | 6.18 W | Active | - | - | |
| PS 3 | 49 mW | Idle | 2 ms | 2 ms | |
| PS 4 | 1.8 mW | Idle | 25 ms | 25 ms | |
Note that the above tables reflect only the information provided by the drive to the OS. The power and latency numbers are often very conservative estimates, but they are what the OS uses to determine which idle states to use and how long to wait before dropping to a deeper idle state.
Idle Power Measurement
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled if supported.
The Corsair Force MP510 has the best active idle power consumption we've seen from a high-end NVMe SSD, and with APST enabled it is second only to Silicon Motion's latest generation of NVMe controllers in deep sleep power savings on our desktop testbed.
This is complemented by a nice quick wakeup from sleep, so aggressive power management settings won't hurt system responsiveness.
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hugo.sousa - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Hi Bill,Where did you bought those refurbished drives?
goatfajitas - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
Yup, its easy enough to do it now on the cheap. A 1tb PCIe SSD for $235 (and a great performing one at that) for your data you access often and larger slower HDD's for less used data/backups etc.wumpus - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
HDDs are running $20/TB (Hitachi 3TB comes up cheapest on pcpartpicker), and even larger drives can be had cheap if you are willing to buy external drives on sale and "shuck" them.The real catch is that 90% of the people use about 100GB or so data, so sales of HDDs are pretty flat. So they stopped getting cheaper around 2011 and pretty much sat around waiting to be replaced by SDDs.
Prices are finally lower than 2011, but I really have to wonder if Moore's law has enough juice to get SDDs down to the level they need to kill off HDDs (in case you are wondering, tape is still alive and kicking. And makes all sorts of sense for storing data >100TB. I wonder if HDDs will go the same way "just for datahoarders".)
stargazera5 - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
@wumpus: "(in case you are wondering, tape is still alive and kicking. And makes all sorts of sense for storing data >100TB"Maybe tape looks good for >100TB, but there are a lot of us home power users who have 10-100 TB that could use a good WORM solution for backup. The cost of tape drives are quite high and drove TCO far too high to make good sense compared to buying additional HDDs a couple times a year, which isn't that cheap either and has far too low a frequency.
I also looked into online backup (e.g. Blackblaze, Carbonite, etc.) until I realized it would take 6 months to send them my base-line backup via my internet pipe (10 Mbps up)
No real good solutions here, but probably a pretty good market.
vanilla_gorilla - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
Some of those services offer disk based import/export options: https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/disk/details/Lolimaster - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
Crucial MX500 go to as low as 0.165 per GB.leexgx - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
""All capacities have a rated write endurance of around 0.9-1.0 drive writes per day and a five year warranty period, which are standard for high-end consumer SSDs""i thought 1.0 DWP was only for enterprise levels (most ssds have DWP of around 0.3)
Diji1 - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
>You know, its getting to price points soon that home servers would easily use SSD drives vs mechanical.Er ... is it?
Diji1 - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
Although there is no excuse for using spinning disks for the OS disk IMO.PaoDeTech - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
Please review Crucial P1 1TB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD. I'm willing to pay $20 premium over SATA but not more. If the P1 1TB goes on black Friday sale for $179.99 I'll pull the trigger (MX500 1TB SATA is currently $159.99).Does anybody know what's the BOM cost difference between SATA and PCIe?