The Corsair MP400 1TB QLC NVMe SSD: A Quick Review
by Billy Tallis on December 11, 2020 2:00 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
The Corsair MP400 is faster on The Destroyer than the other 1TB QLC drives that are based on 4-channel controllers, but it's also generally slower than the DRAMless TLC drives. The MP400 and other QLC drives also require far more energy than the fairly efficient DRAMless TLC competition.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
On the Heavy test, the Corsair MP400 and other QLC drives offer superior peak performance compared to the DRAMless TLC drives, but that situation is reversed when the test is run on a full drive. The MP400 in particular doesn't seem to be as good as the other QLC drives at maintaining decent read latency when full, but this test is very write-intensive so the MP400's overall performance on the full-drive test run is still better than the other QLC drives.
AnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
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| Average Data Rate | |||||||||
| Average Latency | Average Read Latency | Average Write Latency | |||||||
| 99th Percentile Latency | 99th Percentile Read Latency | 99th Percentile Write Latency | |||||||
| Energy Usage | |||||||||
The Light test is short enough to fit entirely within the SLC cache of the 1TB Corsair MP400 when the test is run on an empty drive. That allows the MP400 to outperform the 8TB Sabrent Rocket Q, which is burdened with extra overhead of managing so much flash. The DRAMless TLC drives cannot match the peak performance of the QLC drives that have DRAM. When the test is run on a full drive, the performance of the QLC drives as usual suffers greatly, but the Corsair MP400 remains faster than at least some of the DRAMless TLC drives.
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Spunjji - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
This is the only one of the anti-QLC tropes I see routinely rolling around this comment section that I 100% unequivocally agree with.A quick scan through a certain UK retailer shows the cheapest 1TB drive is the Intel 665p at £89, with the cheapest (relatively crappy) TLC drive at £96 and a WD Blue at £103. Worse still, at the 2TB level the positions flip and the WD Blue is *cheaper*.
At the 1TB level, even though I know objectively that the 665p would be fine for my purposes I'd still be tempted to pay the £14 extra for the Blue. If the difference were £25 or more, I wouldn't.
GeoffreyA - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
It's as if margarine were suddenly the same price as butter, or quite close, and the makers, exterting their marketing force, succeeded (almost succeeded) in blurring the distinction between the two.It would be nice if somebody did a giant endurance experiment, finding out exactly where these QLC drives stand, like the one Techreport tackled in 2015, writing an horrific number of TBs till the drives "breathed their last." There will be surprises.
Oxford Guy - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
They will succeed. Getting everyone to go to a small form factor was very helpful, along with, apparently, not producing TLC in 1024Gbit dies.Margarine was superior to butter back in the day, remember? Superior partially hydrogenated technology. Because they said so.
Oxford Guy - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Not the best comparison, though – since butter was still widely available for reasonable prices.QLC, by contrast, is intended to ruin the economy of scale of TLC. We could find farmers with butter churns pretty easily. Not so easy to find small-scale TLC foundries for the peasantry.
GeoffreyA - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
"Margarine was superior to butter back in the day, remember? Superior partially hydrogenated technology. Because they said so."Nice one.
Oxford Guy - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
QLC doesn't need "tropes" any more than it needs cheerleading.Reality is that 16 voltage states is more problematic than 8 and fewer.
boredsysadmin - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
I 100% agree with @kpb321I am also surprised that SK Hynix Gold P31 didn't make the last page budget consumer NVMe SSDs. MP400 1TB costs $114 on amazon, while one of the fastest budget drives in the review, P31 1TB, is currently at $120.60 - Which one you'd buy? I am "puzzled" by QLC drive makers' greed to raise the price per TB on bigger drives. They aren't the first to fill that niche - I expect the opposite - higher drives to be more expensive but priced the same or cheaper per TB.
Drkrieger01 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
I love how everyone's up in arms at 'Endurance'. Let me give you some insight on just how much 'endurance' you really need. I build a 'high speed storage' server, 16x 840 Evo 1TB, LSI MegaRaid 9750 16i back in 2014. We've been pounding the piss out of this server for *6* years. Not a single drive has reallocated sectors. I believe we've crossed a few petabytes on some of the drives, even after having to flash firmware updates and re-zero the drives due to the decay issue on the 840 Evo's.I'm sure these new drives will be just fine for the average user.
inighthawki - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Let's not forget that most people aren't coming *remotely* close to what you're doing. I bet even most power users would struggle to *consistently* write more than 10-20GB per day average to these drives. Hitting the endurance ratings at these rates would take decades. The SSDs will have been long discarded by that point.Even for the exceptional power user writing 100+GB a day, they would need to consistently do that every day for nearly 6 years to hit the endurance cap on the 1TB model. A user like this will also likely replace these drives within that time frame.
Tomatotech - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
I have little to no worry about endurance for the vast majority of users even with QLC, and even that problem will go away with 2TB+ QLC.That said, your use is unusual, and the 840s were particularly good drives especially with 1TB. The same usage patterns with 256gb TLC or 512GB QLC might well have seen them wear out. Thankfully we’re past that stage now. However you still had to flash firmware and re-zero the drives, and most people with SSDs nowadays won’t know how to do that.