Corsair MP700 Elite 2TB review: PCIe 5.0 for the rest of us

Corsair is pushing PCIe 5.0 into the mainstream. Although it’s easy to find PCIe 5.0 drives among the best SSDs, we’ve seen very few that skip the DRAM cache to reach a more affordable price, and that’s exactly what Corsair is offering with the MP700 Elite. Borrowing some system memory for caching, the MP700 Elite is able to provide a significant uplift in performance over DRAM-based PCIe 4.0 options for not much more money.

It’s an impressive design, and one that absolutely crushes benchmarks when it comes to sequential reads and writes. However, the MP700 Elite is living proof that the PCIe 5.0 standard is still struggling to scale above 1TB, with PCIe 4.0 options offering very similar real-world performance in higher capacities for less money.

If your head is already spinning from PCIe versions and SSD specs, make sure to check out our SSD buying guide.

Pricing and specs

Corsair has a limited lineup for the MP700 Elite, featuring 1TB and 2TB versions either with or without the heatsink. Don’t get it confused with the MP700 or the MP700 Pro, however — this is the MP700 Elite. The MP700 is discontinued, the MP700 Pro is not, and neither is the MP700 Pro SE. You would assume the MP700 Elite is a step above the MP700 Pro, but it’s not — it’s actually slower.

Naming nonsense aside, there are two big differences between the MP700 Elite and its older counterparts. First, it’s using new Kioxia memory modules, along with a new Phison controller. The bigger difference is the DRAM-less design, however. The MP700 Pro line has a DRAM cache, and with a generous ratio of 2GB per terabyte of storage. The MP700 Elite uses a Host Memory Buffer (HMB) and skips the DRAM.

In short, the MP700 Elite borrows some of your system memory for caching instead of using an on-board DRAM cache. An HMB design means the MP700 Elite is slower than the MP700 Pro, but it’s also cheaper — without dedicated DRAM, Corsair is passing on some savings to you. It’s about $40 cheaper at 1TB and $65 cheaper at 2TB, which makes quite a big difference.

Particularly for a 1TB model, $150 is very reasonable for a PCIe 5.0 SSD. The Samsung 990 Pro, which is a PCIe 4.0 design, clocks in at $130 for 1TB. Things change for the 2TB capacity, however, where the MP700 Elite clocks in at $80 more than the 990 Pro. Despite PCIe 5.0 SSD prices dropping, scaling the storage capacity at the same rate is a struggle.

That puts the MP700 Elite in an interesting spot. It’s cheap enough at 1TB to be a reasonable alternative to a PCIe 4.0 SSD like the 990 Pro or the WD Black SN850X, but expensive enough at 2TB as to not make PCIe 4.0 alternatives obsolete. It also strikes a balance of speed between PCIe 4.0 and 5.0, falling well short of the 14,000MB/s speeds on more expensive PCIe 5.0 drives like the Sabrent Rocket 5 and Crucial T705.

It’s a drive that forces you to choose between speed or capacity. You could say that for just about every PCIe 5.0 drive, but the MP700 Elite makes the decision tough. If you value speed on a budget, going with a 1TB design makes sense. However, for gamers and those less tuned into transfer speeds, a larger PCIe 4.0 drive is going to offer just slightly lower performance and much more capacity.

Software and features

For managing the MP700 Elite, Corsair offers its SSD Toolbox. You get a standard suite of features in SSD Toolbox, including manual over-provisioning options, TRIM optimization to surface empty blocks of data, a drive cloning tool, and a secure erase tool that will reformat the data structure to fully erase whatever was stored on the drive.

The features are all here, but SSD Toolbox is rough on the eyes. It looks like it was pulled out of Windows 95, with a static blue background and clipart-style icons fit with their own white squares. Everything works just fine, but you see the image — this isn’t exactly the SSD management app you’d expect to see in 2024.

In addition to downloading SSD Toolbox, you’ll also need to make some changes in Windows to get the best performance out of the MP700 Elite. You’ll need to turn on write-cache buffer flushing in Windows (you can find it in the properties window for the MP700 Elite through device manager) due to the HMB design. It’s not a big deal but still important to note.

Performance

Setting the stage with CrystalDiskMark, the MP700 Elite reaches above its advertised sequential read and write speeds, and by a decent margin. Random reads and writes suffer, however. With the HMB design, you’re getting random read and write speeds that are very similar to what you’ll find with a speedy PCIe 4.0 drive.

It’s really in large sequential file transfers that the speed of the MP700 Elite shows up, as you can see in the AJA Video System test below. There’s a large bump in write speeds over the 990 Pro, and nearly double the performance of the slower, larger capacity WD Blue SN5000. Write speeds don’t scale as high, as expected, but the MP700 Elite still carves out a solid lead over PCIe 4.0 alternatives.

Those leads echo in PCMark 10, though with slightly thinner margins due to the slower random reads and writes. Gaming is where things get interesting. There’s a solid bump in loading time, both in Final Fantasy XIV and 3DMark, which uses real games as the basis for testing. In 3DMark, there’s a 16% jump over the 990 Pro, while in Final Fantasy XIV, the total loading time was 11% faster.

Context is important here, though. Even with those leads, the MP700 Elite wasn’t even able to shave a full second off the loading time in Final Fantasy XIV across a five-minute benchmark with several loading screens. DirectStorage is available on both PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 SSDs, and the loading advantages of PCIe 5.0 alone aren’t enough to justify the extra cost for gamers.

You really need to buy into those large file transfers for the MP700 Elite to make sense. I won’t argue with any gaming leads, but the sequential read and write speeds are the reason to go PCIe 5.0 at this point. If you’re solely in the market for a speedy SSD to store games on, the MP700 Elite is overkill, at least right now.

Should you buy the Corsair MP700 Elite?

The Corsair MP700 Elite brings PCIe 5.0 drives down to a more reasonable price, nearly matching speedy PCIe 4.0 options like the 990 Pro and SN850X. However, it only makes sense right now at 1TB, and in particular, if you have large files you’ll be transferring. Gamers will see a slight bump technically, but any speed advantages will be almost invisible compared to a fast PCIe 4.0 drive.

The 2TB version is too expensive to justify right now considering how much cheaper PCIe 4.0 options are and how close they are in speed. At the time of writing, for example, you can for the same price as the 2TB MP700 Elite.

As for the heatsink version of the MP700 Elite, save yourself some money. The extra size of the heatsink is impractical for most laptops and mini PCs, and the extra cost of PCIe 5.0 goes to waste inside of the PS5. I actually had issues installing the heatsink version inside a Gigabyte motherboard due to the extra size of the cage, in fact.

Even with those issues, the MP700 Elite is a drive to keep an eye on. Particularly as we go into holiday sales, it could be a very compelling drive if Corsair is able to get close to the price of flagship PCIe 4.0 options, especially at 2TB.