Gadgetory

hey guys welcome back to hardware unboxed actually firstly let me just say welcome to 2017 I can't wait to see what goodies the tech industry has first this year speaking of tech goodies last month Corsair announced their new SSD it's an nvme SSD series called the force MP 500 the release comes hot on the heels of Samsung's 960 series so the MP 500 really is being thrown in the deep end at least on paper that doesn't seem to be a big problem for Corsair as their new speedy SSD series boasts some pretty impressive specifications based on the m2 2280 form factor they utilized the pcie 3.0 x 4 interface for blistering fast sequential read speeds of 3 gigabytes per second coupled with an equally impressive write throughput of 2.4 gigabytes per second what's interesting is that although consumers can purchase the MP 500 and one of three capacities 120 gigabyte 240 gigabyte or 480 gigabyte Corsair is claiming the same sequential read and write performance for all three models that said there is a rather large discrepancy in input/output performance with the 120 gigabyte version severely lagging behind the larger 240 gigabyte and 480 bite models so as you might expect performance will be down on the 120 gigabyte model so just be aware of that for testing we do have the granddaddy the 480 gigabyte model on hand and that's the biggest fastest model available in the series at present so we will be showing best case performance then what's interesting about the new 4 MP 500 series and quite important to note is the fact they are using mlc nand memory and not the cheaper less durable TLC stuff like the 960 Evo series this is worth keeping in mind when noting the price as the 480 gigabyte version that we have is retailing for around 325 us or four hundred and forty dollars for my fellow aziz the 512 gigabyte version of the 960 pro which also uses mlc nand cost 330 u.s. or 450 ozzie the only possible Thorne and Corsair side is the TLC base 960 Evo version the 500 gigabyte model cost just 250 US or 340 Ozzy so I'll be interesting to see how the MP 500 compares in terms of performance before we jump to the benchmarks I just like to touch on a few more things whereas the Samsung models feature a Samsung controller Corsa hasn't actually had to rely on a third-party that third party being fires them with their PS 5 double-oh-seven - c7 controller so far there are very few SSDs in the world using this controller so I'm personally yet to see how it handles connected to the controllers to shape a 15 nanometer mlc nand along with a 512 megabyte DRAM buffer please note that the 240 gigabyte model features a smaller 256 megabytes buffer and the 120 gigabyte model comes with a 128 megabytes buffer currently aes 256-bit encryption isn't supported but corsair does hope to deliver a new firmware update soon to add in support finally all three models are being backed by a three-year warranty which isn't bad though we would have liked to have seen them match Samsung's five-year warranty still Corsa is claiming a 698 terabytes of written data rating but of course you only have three years to prove them wrong when it comes to software the force MP 500 series is backed by the rather ugly Corsair SSD toolbox it has to be said I am used to seeing much more polished looking software from Corsair and I expect the SSD toolbox to see some major upgrades in 2017 basically most of the functions aren't compatible with nvme drives at this point so MP 500 owners can't view the drive smart status total host rights run a secure wipe change the over provisioning or mess with the trim command settings technically the MP 500 doesn't require a special driver to work that said it does if you want to extract a maximum performance from the drive and right now Corsair doesn't actually offer an nvme driver Samsung recently released a new nvm Express driver which greatly improved performance under Windows 10 and 8.1 the problem being that these operating systems by default enable a write cache buffer known as the force unit access command which dramatically reduces performance this command is a conservative approach taken by Microsoft to ensure data integrity in case of sudden power loss however from Windows 8 onwards Microsoft also incorporated an automatic flush command to ensure data integrity but they simultaneously maintain the much-older force unit access command in the standard driver settings this redundancy means that the write speeds are significantly inhibited due to an unnecessary write verification process by manually disabling the command the write performance does reach expected levels however manually manipulating drive properties isn't very user friendly which is obviously why samsung developed their own nvme driver to do this automatically hopefully Corsair will follow suit and do the same anyway by this point I think we've pretty much covered the meat potatoes of it let's get to that juicy steak I of course mean the benchmarks I'm just going to breeze through a few graphs and then show you the force MP 500 going head-to-head with the samsung 960 Evo using an external capture device to show you real-time performance right so first up we have the a s SSD benchmark sequential results here the MP 500 looks good despite being slower than its Samsung rivals the read bandwidth was down 15% when compared to the 960 pro while the write performance was disappointingly 36% lower the 4k 64 thread performance was also down on the Samsung drives here the MP 500 was 44% slow in the 960 pro when comparing the write performance again the MP 500 s numbers were respectable but just not as large as we would have liked the drives access times are on par with a 960 Pro so that's great to see interestingly both of these drives though are slower than the older 950 Pro here we have a few quick copy tests and we find the MP 500 struggling to compete with last season's 9 and 50 Pro in fact while the prog copy performance was much the same the MP 500 was almost 30% slower and moving our game data then compared to Samsung's 960 series it was a bit of a bloodbath if I'm honest the last graph we're going to look at shows us the 7-zip file extraction performance again the MP 500 does come in well under what we were hoping for taking 93 seconds to complete the work load with a throughput of just 3 hundred eighty-three megabytes per second surprisingly that actually makes it slower than the Kingston Predator SSD first up for the side-by-side comparisons we have everyone's favorite the boot test this one's pretty simple we measure the time it took for the system to load starting the test is the Windows 10 logo appeared we then stop the clock the moment the desktop loaded this tilt course has np-500 just four seconds an impressive time indeed meanwhile the 960 Evo limped over the finish line a few seconds later and given the results just seen previously I'm surprised to see the MP 500 winning in this test want to be the first one into every game well a snappy SSD is the best way to achieve that the 960 Evo took just 8 seconds to complete the Call of Duty infinite warfare level load time test meanwhile the MP 500 was slightly slower taking 11 seconds not much in it though and this is the kind of performance I was expecting to see it also makes the MP 500 a good bit faster than your typical sadr SSD as well those of you who fire up Premiere Pro CC multiple times a day like I do will appreciate how quick an nvme Drive makes things the 960 Evo takes just 5 seconds to load Premiere Pro while the MP 500 took 9 seconds again even at nine seconds the MP 500 is a good bit faster than your average SATA SSD finally we have the 7-zip 38 gigabyte file extraction test and although we have already looked at the performance in this test previously in graph form this is how the MP 509 60 Evo compare in a real-time comparison as seen previously when loading windows applications and games the MP 500 isn't that much slower than the 960 Evo how it was actually faster getting into Windows however when we do start to turn up the heat with some heavy right traffic the MP 500 does start to lag behind the competition and this was seen previously when looking at the file copy tests small writes also seem to be a bit of an issue as well and this is something fires and controllers have struggled with in the past the 960 Evo is able to blast through the 7-zip test thanks to a throughput of 660 megabytes per second and frankly that still makes it rather slow in comparison to the 960 pros almost 1 gigabytes per second sustained throughput the MP 500 on the other hand just over a minute and a half to complete the test due to a rather limited 383 megabytes per second throughput granted that hardly makes it slow though well under half the performance of Samsung's 960 Pro it looks like Corsair really needs to be more aggressive with their pricing which isn't great as I do believe the margins are already very slim here Corsairs force MP 500 is a solid contender based on our testing it seems to do everything quite well and if you can ignore the recently released samsung 960 series for just a moment then yeah it looks pretty good the problem being that it's entering in an arena that's already occupied by two uncontested heavyweights fighting for the same team basically it's a bit like taking a light heavyweight and throwing him in the Octagon to battle it out against steep a Miocic and Cain Velasquez it's not going to go well of course Corsair might be able to change things a little over the coming months to help stack things more in their favor essentially they would do this by lowering the price though it has to be said I don't believe there is much room to move here unfortunately for now the MP 500 series does come up short against the 960 Pro in a nutshell for the same price you're getting less performance and a shorter warranty period that said you can actually buy the MP 500 right now for the advertised MSRP while the 960 pro availability is still very poor at least at the time of creating this video finally I am in the process of updating my core i7 benchmark machine we will be updating it to KB Lake even though it's not really much of an update but still we will be going with the core i7 7700 K and I'm not sure what speed will be clocking that out for the benchmarks might go up from 4.5 from the 6700 K to something like four point eight or four point nine with the 7700 K life a little bit more thinking about that but anyway that system will be sponsored by a Corsair so they're providing a heap of cool stuff case power supply this SSD will be in there the MP 500 and will also be featuring for secondary storage the force Ally SSD as well so keep an eye out for that build video with that I'm going to hand it over to you guys as always let me know what you think in the comments I'm your host Steve and I will see you on the next one on