Corsair MP600 Mini 2TB SSD Review

Today we’ve got a wonderful little teeny tiny SSD to take a look at, the Corsair MP600 Mini 2TB. This M.2 2230 PCIe 4.0 drive claims to have “up to 7,000 MB/s read and 6,200 MB/s write” speeds on a PCIe 4.0 x4 package. Corsair claims, “The CORSAIR MP600 MINI provides great storage performance in a tiny package that’s ideal for the Steam Deck and Microsoft Surface, achieving rapid read and write speeds.” Can this teeny tiny little drive hold up to the big claims? Let’s dive in and see together!

Specifications:

Unboxing:

As we take our first actual looks at this drive and the packaging, the first thing I notice is all the yellow on the box.  Black and yellow are quite nice together, and this box visually is no exception. Packaging for this drive is about perfect and exactly what you’d expect on a drive this small. The backside of the box has some marketing claims, trademark notices, and other legal notices. Cracking the box open, we can start pulling the drive out as well as the warranty and safety information cards.

Once the drive is fully out of the box, we do see the little heat spreader sticker on the drive with the model number of “MP600 Mini” (this is NOT to be confused with the MP600 Core Mini which is an entirely different drive based on QLC instead of TLC).  On the backside of the drive, we see another heatspreader sticker that has the drive’s full serial number, kind of typical with NVMe drives, so really nothing of interest to note in the unboxing process here. The drive is incredibly tiny though, I’ll give it that.

Testing:

Now, Corsair is claiming that this drive is suitable for smaller form factor systems, and unfortunately there’s a few problems with that we need to discuss. I do have a Valve Steam Deck on hand that could certainly use an upgraded SSD, mine’s the 512GB model. During the testing process, I decided to not use the Steam Deck however because it only supports PCIe 3.0 for the m.2 slots on the version I have.  This SSD is PCIe 4.0 and absolutely can utilize those extra speeds. As my Steam Deck eventually fills up, I’m sure I probably will put this drive in there just so I have the capacity. However for the purpose of testing this drive, this would be a silly idea given that the drive would be bottlenecked by the controller on the Steam Deck. So instead, we’ll use an AM5 build for testing this drive.

Test System:

• AMD Ryzen 9 7900x
• Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite AX
• 32GB G.Skill FlareX DDR5-6000 (@ 5600)
• Sapphire Radeon RX 7900XTX Pulse
• Seasonic Focus Gold GX 1000w
• Solidigm P41 Plus 2TB
• Corsair MP600 Mini 2TB

So upon installing the drive, I opted to buy and use a 2280 to 2230 NVME adapter I bought off Ebay from a small 3d printing store. Obviously this isn’t the way most people will be installing this drive, but since I wasn’t going for a permanent installation here this worked fine. Most desktop systems today you’ll probably end up needing an adapter, or to use the built in motherboard m.2 heatsink to keep the drive in place. You can also buy an aftermarket m.2 heatsink if you’d rather as well. Either should work. For the smaller devices this SSD is intended for, this would be a non issue.

Our first testing here was using AS SSD Benchmark. Here we see the older Solidigm P41 Plus 2TB drive that I have in the system, also a PCIe 4.0 drive doing decently well as expected. Around 3600 MB/s read and 2500 MB/s writes. The new Corsair MP600 Mini 2TB however absolutely blows the Solidigm drive out of the water with almost 6100 MB/s reads and almost 6000 MB/s writes, wow!  It’s not quite hitting the claimed 7000 MB/s read speeds in this benchmark, but the performance improvement is jaw dropping here.

Next testing we did was ATTO Benchmark. Here, we see more of the same; the Corsair MP600 Mini is yet again blowing away this older Solidigm P41 drive.

CrystalDiskMark Benchmark is also showing the same results with the P41 Plus doing around 4000 MB/s read and 3300 MB/s write speeds, which are very reputable and decent PCIe 4.0 NVME SSD speeds. But then this Corsair MP600 Mini comes in and destroys it yet again, and actually meets (and breaks) the advertised speeds, 7292 MB/s read speeds and 5295 MB/s write speeds, amazing! So this drive is faster than claimed in this given scenario.

Software:

Corsair does offer software as well to go with their SSD’s called Corsair SSD Toolbox.  This software will tell you drive information, allow you to clone drives, wipe, optimize, and even give SMART statistics. You can download it here. It’s also neat to notice that their software also recognizes and works with my Solidigm drive as well.

As we can see with the software, it definitely has an older software look to it, but its quite functional.  Some people might say it could use a UI refresh to something more modern.  I, however, find the simplicity and ease of use of the basic UI design to be appealing.  The buttons could use some transparency and border effects maybe, but honestly the software was super easy to use.

Conclusion:

So what do we think of Corsair’s MP600 Mini 2TB SSD? Is it a good fit for small and thin devices? Absolutely it is!  Is it fast?  Well, the answer is absolutely! Faster than advertised even in some instances. Is it a good value? Amazon currently has it on sale for $229.99 at the time of writing; so that’s between you and your financial advisors. All I can tell you, from my experience with this drive and Corsair’s reputation, is that this drive should be a solid. It beats its marketing expectations, and it’ll fit in just about any device since its so small. The TLC NAND it has on board should last years and years to come. I’d have to say this drive is absolutely recommended for those looking for a drive such as this.

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