We've been saying it for years, if y'all're building a new computer or upgrading an old one, an SSD should exist at the top of your listing. For budget builds or older systems that means something like Crucial'due south MX300, a SATA drive that offers extreme snappiness for a reasonable price.

Those building more extreme desktop systems volition no doubt be aiming for an NVMe SSD. The PCI Express bus provides much more bandwidth for unleashing these loftier-speed storage devices. However, not all NVMe drives are created the aforementioned, and we saw that last yr when checking out Intel's hopeless SSD 600p. That drive was plagued by poorly sustained write performance, which would meet it drop even below hard drive-like operation.

Corsair's latest entry into the high performance SSD loonshit...

At the reverse terminate of the spectrum, we have the Samsung SSD 960 which has set up the bar in terms of price and performance. To date aught can compete with the 960 Pro series and the 2TB version has been my weapon of choice for months now. The more than affordable 960 Evo series is as well really skillful, though I feel similar if y'all are going to spend this much money on a high-speed SSD, yous might as well ensure that information technology uses MLC NAND and not the slightly less reliable TLC stuff.

I of the few companies that have tried (and got close) to dethroning Samsung at the peak of their game is Corsair. Dorsum in January we checked out their Force Series MP500 480GB. In curt, the MP500 was a cracking-all rounder boasting decent functioning and a loftier endurance rating. The downside was pricing. At $325 it matched the 512GB 960 Pro but information technology was slower, and thus a tough sell.

6 months later, pricing has improved and the MP500 is far more competitive. The peak 480GB model costs $0.53 per gigabyte ($255) whereas the 960 Pro 512GB comes in at a slightly higher $0.58 and can be had for $300.

The Corsair MP500 took advantage of Phison's PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD controller dubbed PS5007-E7, forth with Toshiba's 15nm MLC NAND. Other brands released their own drives using this controller, among them the Patriot Hellfire M2 and PNY CS2030.

More recently, in mid-March Zotac came out with the Sonix which likewise sports the Phison controller and Toshiba MLC memory. However they opted for the half-height one-half-length PCI Express 3.0 x4 form-gene rather than the more compact G.2.

It was expected that other brands such as Corsair, Patriot, Mushkin, PNY and Kingston would before long offer similar products. And then it comes as lilliputian surprise that Corsair has just released a HHHL (one-half-height half-length), PCI Limited 3.0 x4 SSD, once once more using the Phison PS5007-E7 controller and 15nm Toshiba MLC retentiveness.

Which begs the question. Is this just the MP500 on a PCIe adapter card? Well, it's a fiddling more than that. This isn't an Chiliad.2 drive mounted on an adapter card, rather the components are direct mounted to the PCB and this comes with a few advantages that I will affect on soon.

For now let's talk specs, the Neutron Serial NX500 comes in either 400GB or 800GB capacities, both using the HHHL course factor. Meanwhile, the MP500 series offers 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities using the M.2-2280 form factor.

Both use the aforementioned PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, Phison controller and 15nm MLC NAND wink retentiveness. The DRAM cache chapters has been upgraded, previously the 480GB MP500 sported a 512MB cache, the NX500 400GB has been upgraded with a 1GB cache while the 800GB model gets a 2GB cache, both make use of DDR3 retentiveness hither.

Equally you might expect the sequential read and write speeds are the same, 3GB/s read coupled with 2.4GB/south write. The random read and write IOPS performance has been improved by 20 - thirty%, the NX500 series offers upwards to 300,000 IOPS when reading and 270,000 when writing. Power consumption and endurance is the same, except for the larger 800GB model which comes with an impressive endurance rating of 1396 TBW. Finally, the warranty menstruation has been upgraded from 3 years to a more competitive 5 years, so that'south great to see.

So you may be wondering what's new here?

Frankly in terms of specifications, non much except for the class factor, but that's kind of a big bargain. Although the M.2 grade gene is all the rage now and support is as potent every bit information technology's ever been, those new X299 boards accept advantage of multiple drives and the upcoming X399 boards are prepare to do the same.

However this small, compact form gene while very impressive is brutal on the components. Oestrus is the master consequence here and getting rid of information technology is the problem. With no room for acceptable cooling, keeping controllers cool is a real challenge and it's something most K.2 drives fail to do, making them unsuitable for sustained throughput.

The Samsung SSD 960 Evo which I have on mitt for this example goes from an idle temperature of ~30 degrees to over sixty degrees within a infinitesimal of sustained data transfer, and at this point write functioning is throttled back heavily. That said, the throttling doesn't help put temperatures in check and in our 100GB transfer examination temps tiptop at 90 degrees.

So while it's possible to write around 20GB of data at over 1.5GB/s, going beyond that reduced throughput to around a third of the original operation.

Moving to the Neutron NX500, we started the 100GB transfer test with a drive temp of 34 degrees, pretty much what we saw from the Evo.

Nonetheless by the cease of the test, both the write and read tests, the bulldoze temp never exceeded 49 degrees and we never saw any kind of throttling. So, for sustained writes over 20 GB the NX500 was actually more twice as fast equally the 960 Evo, and the aforementioned will exist truthful for the SSD 960 Pro.

Granted, information technology's unlikely virtually of yous volition often move more than than nigh twenty GB worth of information in one hit, but when you do the NX500 will perform meliorate.

The simple explanation for this is passive cooling. The Neutron NX500 has a huge chunk of aluminum strapped onto the front of the PCB and is connected to the surface of the Phison controller using a thermal pad. So while you lot will have to sacrifice a PCI Limited expansion slot, you practice so in favor of getting maximum operation nether all weather condition.

Permit's jump into the benchmarks for a few more than quick tests...

Kickoff upwardly I checked out the sequential read and write performance in As SSD Criterion and here the NX500 provided very like results to the MP500, as expected. Corsair claims the same sequential performance for both the 400GB MX500 and 480GB MP500.

The 4K-64 thread performance was also very similar, the NX400 was slightly downward on the MP500 here, though these results are pretty close to margin of error stuff.

Access fourth dimension operation is a little off. The write results are much the same for both the NX400 and MP500, while the newer NX400 lacks a little when information technology comes to read admission fourth dimension, that said the results aren't bad.

Moving to our on-disk copy examination results the NX500 again demonstrates MP500-like operation.

Information technology edged ahead in the game copy test, though merely by a five% margin. I should note that neither of these tests movement more than than 3GB worth of information, so throttling won't exist a problem hither. The idea here isn't to move around large volumes of data simply instead hit the drives with a mixture of minor and large, compressed and non-compressed files.

Finally, we take the 7-Zip file extraction test which does work with a big 38 GB archive. As you tin can see where the Samsung 960 Evo was previously proficient for well over 1GB/south, it now drops downwards to 660 MB/s for the average transfer speed. However, the NX500 was still quite a bit slower and despite fugitive any throttling problems, it is unable to make a pace forrad from the MP500, an SSD which clearly doesn't suffer from throttling issues.

Windows 10 Boot

Loading Windows the Corsair NX500 took v.iv seconds, which is longer than the 4.4 seconds the MP500 likewise,k only amend than the six.3 seconds the 960 Evo takes.

Phone call of Duty Level Load Time

The Call of Duty Infinite Warfare level load time took simply 8.1 seconds. The 960 Evo took 8.iv seconds and the MP500 11 seconds, so a practiced improvement over the MP500 here.

Wrapping Up the Corsair Neutron NX500

I'1000 coming away with like feelings to my MP500 review and I guess that makes sense as they are very like products. The Corsair drives suffer from no real weaknesses, they're blistering fast, merely given the about matching toll, Samsung drives are yet a tad faster.

Even power users won't notice the difference between the MP500 and 960 Pro for the vast majority of workloads. The same is true when looking at the NX500, it'southward another solid all-rounder and under prolonged torture it won't buckle, though neither did the MP500.

Once again the issue here is the asking toll. The NX500 400GB that we simply reviewed volition be sold for $320 and while that's better than the Zotac Sonix, it's significantly more the current request cost of the MP500 480GB and Samsung 960 Evo 500GB, in fact, it'south more than expensive than the 960 Pro 512GB as well.

Pros: The Corsair NX500 is a smashing SSD that offers solid performance, runs cool, has excellent endurance and comes with a competitive 5 year warranty.

Cons: It needs to be at least 20% cheaper to recommend it over Corsair'south ain MP500 or Samsung drives.