Corsair MP400

It comes in a gargantuan sizes, but is undone by its lacklustre performance and lifespan

SCORE

PRICE 2TB, £201 (£241 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324mp4

READ SPEED 2,875MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 2,788MB/ SEC

If you’re looking for a huge M.2 drive, the MP400 has you covered: as well as 1TB and 2TB models, it’s offered in supersized 4TB and 8TB capacities. The 8TB version will set you back a chunky £1,250, but pricing is more reasonable elsewhere: the 1TB model costs £108, equivalent to 11p per gigabyte, and the 2TB and 4TB models work out to 13p/GB.

Corsair keeps the price down by using QLC technology, storing four bits of data in each memory cell rather than the three used by most other SSDs. This has an effect on performance: while headline read and write speeds are on par with other PCI Express Gen3 drives, the drive struggles with sustained throughput. The PCMark benchmark clearly exposed the effect of this, awarding the MP400 a low system disk score of 1,030 – around what you would expect from a SATA drive.

More concerningly, the use of QLC also shortens the expected lifespan of the MP400. Although the 2TB model we tested comes with a five-year warranty, it’s rated for a low 400TBW. The 1TB drive promises just 200TBW, a mere third of what you will get from most rival drives.

The Corsair MP400 would make a fine data disk. In that role, high capacities would be a boon, while write endurance and throughput would be less of an issue: indeed, the drive scored a very satisfactory 4,005 in the PCMark data disk benchmark. However, most people shopping for an NVMe SSD surely want to run Windows on it, and this isn’t the right drive for that job.