Corsair MP500 480GB

NVMe allows the MP500 to deliver strong performance, but it’s not exceptional enough to justify the price

Corsair’s MP500 is an expensive SSD. Of this month’s crop of M.2 drives, only the Samsung 960 Pro costs more. However, the Samsung somewhat justifies its high price with best-in-class performance; the MP500, not so much.

To be fair, the MP500 easily outpaces any SATA drive. For sequential read and write operations, no 2.5in model can come close, and the Corsair proved a strong performer at multithreaded random reads too. Among its NVMe peers, however, the MP500 ranked fourth in a field of five.

There is one area where the MP500 excels, and that’s write endurance. Corsair claims that the drive will handle a huge 698TBW – equivalent to writing around 190GB a day for ten years. Obviously that’s far in excess of what a domestic role requires; frankly you’re unlikely to wear out any of this month’s drives before the time comes to upgrade them. But if you have a particularly intensive workload, that could swing it for the MP500.

Aside from that, there’s not much to recommend this particular drive. There’s no support for hardware encryption, and while the Corsair software provides some useful functions, it’s not exactly a joy to use. At a lower price, the MP500 could be a tempting way to break through the performance limitations of SATA. As it stands, you’d be bonkers to go for this when the Samsung 960 Evo is faster and cheaper.