Corsair on Tuesday launched a new NVMe solid state drive line that, on paper, appears to be at least as fast as Samsung's popular 970 Evo family, but at cheaper price points across the board.
The Corsair Force Series MP510 is offered in 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, and 1.92TB capacities. These are M.2 form factor drives, which are those gum stick-sized SSDs that plug directly into supported motherboards without the need for a dedicated power cable.
M.2 drives come in both SATA and NVMe flavors, the latter of which leverages the PCI Express bus for potentially much faster read and write speeds. In this case, the new MP510 drives are all NVMe. According to Corsair, they are capable of delivering up to 3,480MB/s of read performance and up to 3,000MB/s of write performance.
We haven't tested the new drives yet, though on paper, the numbers compare favorably to Samsung's 970 Evo family. Samsung's drives are rated to deliver up to 3,500MB/s of read performance and up to 2,500MB/s of write performance.
If the numbers hold true, Corsair's MP510 drives should offer comparable read performance and faster writes. For the time being, Corsair also has Samsung beat on street pricing. Here's how it breaks down on Amazon:
- Corsair MP510 960GB: $235.99 (~$0.25 per GB)
- Samsung 970 Evo 1TB: $277.99 (~$0.28 per GB)
- Corsair MP510 480GB: $124.99 (~$0.25 per GB)
- Samsung 970 Evo 500GB: $139.99 (~$0.28 per GB)
- Corsair MP510 240GB: $65.99 (~0.27 per GB)
- Samsung 970 Evo 250GB: $87.99 (~0.35 per GB)
Corsair's drives are a little smaller in capacity at each price point, though still hit lower prices per gigabyte. The biggest gap in price is with the 240GB (Corsair) and 250GB (Samsung) models, where Corsair's drive is around 8 cents cheaper per gigabyte.
I didn't compare the 1.92TB drive because it's not yet available to purchase, and so pricing information isn't available. If the price per gigabyte scales, however, it would cost in the neighborhood of $480-$520 (Samsung's 970 Evo 2TB runs $577.99 on Amazon, which is around $0.29 per gigabyte).
There are still better deals to be had in SATA territory, and for gaming, that's all you really need. Where the added speed of an NVMe drive potentially comes in handy is when shuffling a lot of files around, particularly big ones like RAW pictures and 4K videos. At these prices though, you're not paying through the nose for faster storage that you may or not may not immediately benefit from.
For anyone interested, Corsair's new SSDs are available now and backed by a 5-year warranty.
