Introduction

Corsair is a US-based peripherals and hardware company founded in 1994. It is now one of the leading manufacturers for gaming gear, with a portfolio spanning nearly every component you could need: DRAM memory modules, flash SSDs, keyboards, mice, cases, cooling, and much more.

The MP700 Elite is Corsair’s newest PCIe Gen 5 SSD. If you think you’ve heard “MP700” before, then you are right, Corsair is using this model number for all their Gen 5 drives so far—we’ve seen a “MP700 Pro,” “Pro SE” and of course the plain “MP700.” While all the older drives are based on Phison’s E26, the most popular PCIe 5.0 SSD controller, the MP700 Elite is built using the Phison E31—not sure why they didn’t pick a different number to clarify that.

With the E31, Phison has added a second, cost-optimized, controller to their Gen 5 lineup. It’s specifically designed for cost-efficient solutions, while the flagship E26 continues to cater to high-performance needs. Gen 5 SSDs have been on the market for a bit over a year, and virtually all drives came with a Phison controller—the E26. The problem—they are expensive and consume a lot of power, which means large heatsinks—many with an active cooling fan—have to be used.

The E31 is designed to address that. It uses the 7 nm TSMC process, with a design focus on optimizing power. The controller is paired with Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND operating at 3600 MT/s. For cost reasons a DRAM cache chip is not included, but the controller will use up to 64 MB of main memory through the Host-Memory-Buffer (HMB) feature.

The Corsair MP700 Elite will be available with or without heatsink and comes in capacities of 1 TB ($260 / $270) and 2 TB ($150 / $160), so you’re paying an extra $10 for the heatsink. The endurance is set to 600 TBW and 1200 TBW. Corsair offers a five-year warranty with the MP700 Elite.