Gadgetory

I've been saying it for years now if you're building on your computer upgrading an old one and access D should be at the top of your list for budget builds or upgrading an older system this means getting something like crucial MX 300 I start a drive that offers extreme snappiness at a reasonable price those building a more extreme desktop system will no doubt be aiming for something more like an nvme SSD the PCI Express bus provides so much more bandwidth furnishing these high-speed storage devices not all nvme drives are created equally though we saw this last year we checked out Intel's rather hopeless SSD 600 P model was plagued by poor sustained write performance which would see it drop below hard drive light performance before too long at the complete opposite end of the spectrum we have the samsung SSD 960 series which pretty much set the bar in terms of price and performance today nothing can compete with the 960 Pro Series and the 2 terabyte version has been my weapon of choice for more than half a year now the 960 Evo series is extremely good but I feel like if you're going to spend this much money on a high-speed SSD you might as well ensure that it uses mlc nand and not the slightly less reliable TLC stuff since the release of samsung's 960 series back in October of 2016 numerous challenges have stepped forward and an effort to try and snatch the performance crown from the Korean companies grasp so far not have been able to do so one such company was Corsair with their 4 series MP 500 and I checked out the 480 gigabyte model back in January in short the MP 500 was a great all-rounder boasting decent performance and a high endurance rating the downside being that in terms of pricing it simply couldn't compete at $325 u.s. it matched the 512 gigabyte 960 pro and given it was quite a bit smaller this made courses nvme SSD a tough sell today pricing has improved in the MP 500 series is far more competitive the flagship for 80 gigabyte model for example cost just 53 cents per gigabyte at 255 dollars whereas the 960 pro 5 gigabyte comes in at a slightly higher 58 cents per gigabyte as it can now be had for $300 u.s. the MP 500 advantage of fire zones pcie 3.0 times for nvme SSD controller dubbed PS v w7 - e 7 along with 2 Sheba's 15 nanometer mlc nand a number of other brands have released their own versions such as patriot with their hellfire m2 and P&Y released a catchy sounding CS 2030 more recently in mid-march so Tech came out with this Sonics which also duns the fising controller and Toshiba mlc memory however they opted for a half-height 1/2 link PCI Express 3.0 times for form factor rather than much more compact m2 form factor it was expected that other brands such as Corsair Patriot musk and PMI and Kingston for example would soon offer similar products so it comes with a little surprised that Corsair has just released HHH L that is of course a half flight half length PCI Express 3.0 times for SSD once again using the files in PS 5 double-oh-seven - a7 controller and 15 nanometer Toshiba mlc memory so is this just an MP 500 on a PCIe adapter card or is it something more well thankfully it is a little more than that this is an attempt to drive mounted on an adapter card that's the kind of thing we often see from Kingston rather the components are directly mounted to the PCB and this comes with a few advantages that will touch on shortly for now let's talk specs the nutrient series nx500 comes either 400 or 800 gigabyte capacities and of course the form factor is h HL meanwhile the MP 500 series offers 120 gigabyte 240 bite and 480 gigabyte capacities using the m2 2280 form factor both use the same pcie 3.0 x 4 interface files and controller and 15 nanometer mlc nand flash memory the DRAM cache capacity has been upgraded previously the 480 gigabyte MP 500 sported a 512 megabyte cache the nx500 400 gigabyte has been upgraded with a one gigabyte cache while the eight hundred gigabyte model gets a much larger 2 gigabyte cache and both still make use of ddr3 memory here as you might expect the quoted sequential read and write speeds are the same three gigabytes read coupled with a 2.4 gigabytes per second write the random reading right IELTS performance has been improved by between 20 and 30 percent and the nx500 series offers up to 300,000 I ops when reading and 270,000 when writing meanwhile the insurance rating remains the same as does the power consumption that said the larger 800 gigabyte model comes with an impressive endurance rating of thirteen hundred and ninety six terabytes written finally the warranty period has been upgraded from three years to a much more competitive five years so that's great to see so at this point you might be wondering what's new here frankly in terms of specifications as you've just seen nothing really other than the form factor but that is kind of a big deal although the MTU form factor is all the rage now and support is as strong as it's ever been those new X 299 boards for example take advantage of multiple drives and the upcoming X 399 boards are set to do the same however this small compact form factor while very impressive is brutal on the component heat is the main issue here and getting rid of it is the problem with no room for adequate cooling keeping the controller cool is a real challenge and it's something most m2 drives fail to do making them unsuitable for sustained throughput the Samsung SSD 960 Evo which I have on hand for example goes from an idle temperature of around 30 degrees to over 60 degrees within a minute of sustained data transfer and at this point the write performance is throttled back quite heavily that said the throttling doesn't help with the temperatures in check and you know 100 gigabyte transfer test temps peak at 90 degrees so while it's possible to write around 20 gigabytes of data at over 1.5 gigabytes per second going beyond that reduces the throughput to around a third of the original performance unfortunately I don't have the MP 500 drive on hand for comparison currently Tim is using that in his Rison 7 editing rig so the samsung SSD 960 Evo will have to do moving to the NX 500 we started the 100 gigabyte transfer test with a drive temper 34 degrees pretty much what we saw from the Evo however by the end of the test that's the right Android test the drive temp never exceeded 49 degrees and we never saw any kind of throttling so for sustained writes over 20 gigabytes in size the nx500 was actually more than twice as fast as the 960 Evo and it can expect to be quicker than 960 pro as well granted it's unlikely most of you will often move more than say 20 gigabytes worth of data and one hit but when you do the nx500 will perform much better the reason the x500 works so much better is down to the fact that that huge chunk of aluminium strapped onto the front side of the PCB is connected to the surface of the files and controller using a thermal pad so while you will have to sacrifice a PCI Express expansion slot you do so on the knowledge of knowing you'll be getting the maximum performance under all conditions all right let's jump into the benchmarks for a few more quick tests first up I checked out the sequential read and write performance in the a SSD benchmark and here the nx500 provided very similar results to the MP 500 as expected corsair claims the same sequential performance of both the 400 gigabyte and x 500 and 480 gigabyte MP 500 moving on the 4k 64 thread performance was also very similar the NX 400 was slightly down on the MP 500 here though these results are pretty close to margin of error stuff the access time performance is a little off the right results are much the same for both the NX 400 and MP 500 while the newer NX 400 lacks a little when it comes to read access time that said the results aren't bad moving along to our on disk copy test results the nx500 again demonstrates MP 500 light performance at edged ahead in our game copy tests they're only by a 5% margin I should note though that neither of these tests move more than three gigabytes worth of data so throttling won't be a problem here the idea isn't to move around large volumes of data but instead hit the drives of the mixture of small and large compressed and non compressed files finally we have the 7-zip file extraction test and here we do work with a large 38 gigabyte archive and as you can see the samsung 960 if I was previously good for around one gigabyte per second it now drops down to 660 megabytes per second for the average transfer speed that said the nx500 was still quite a bit slower and despite avoiding any throttling issues isn't really able to make a step forward from the MP 500 an SSD which clearly didn't suffer from any throttling issues loading windows the nx500 took just five point four seconds which is longer than the four point four seconds the MP 500 took but better than the six point three seconds the nine de veau takes the call of duty' infinite warfare level load time test took just 8.1 seconds which is very impressive given the 960 Evo took 8.4 seconds and the NP 500 11 seconds so good improvement over the NP 500 here okay so time to sum up core says new nx500 SSD hmm I'm coming away with this one with similar feelings that of my MP 500 review I guess that makes sense as they are very similar products in a nutshell my only real issue with the MP 500 was the price and that was a shame given the drive suffered no real weaknesses yes it is slower than the Samsung 960 series sometimes quite a lot slower in the benchmarks but even so overall the NPD 500 was very capable and at no time did it feel anything but blistering fast my point is even power users won't notice a difference between the MP 500 and the 960 pro for the vast majority of workloads the same is true when looking at the nx500 it's another solid all-rounder and under prolonged torture won't buckle though neither did the MP 500 once again the issue here is the asking price the 400 gigabyte model that I reviewed will be incoming at 320 dollars u.s. and while that's a better price than the zotac Sonic's for example it's still significantly more than the current asking price of the MP 500 480 gigabyte and Samsung 960 Evo 500 gigabyte in fact it's more than the 960 pro 512 gigabyte as well pricing will no doubt improve over time that said though there's really no way Corsair can match the current price of the MP 500 with this new nx500 drive it's clearly a more costly product to produce is a lot more material a lot more product here when compared to your standard m2 device so keep that in mind and given that there is really no advantage to this product over the MP 500 the MP 500 doesn't throttle will have any performance issues when sustaining large writes so paying a premium for the NX 500 is a bit of a tough sell paying a premium for the 960 pro on the other hand to avoid throttling issues now that would be well worth it so take note Samsung anyway in short the corset nx500 is a great SSD and off the solid performance it runs cool as you've just seen has an excellent endurance rating and comes with a competitive five-year warranty the only problem being it needs to be I'd say at least twenty percent cheaper than the current MSRP and I think that's what I'm going to leave this one a good product just needs to be a little more competitively priced I'm your host Steve if you like this video you know what to do