Those building more extreme desktop systems will no doubt be aiming for an NVMe SSD.
The PCI Express bus provides much more bandwidth for unleashing these high-speed storage devices.
Back in January we checked out theirForce Series MP500 480GB.
In short, the MP500 was a great-all rounder boasting decent performance and a high endurance rating.
The downside was pricing.
At $325 it matched the 512GB 960 Pro but it was slower, and thus a tough sell.
Six months later, pricing has improved and the MP500 is far more competitive.
Other brands released their own drives using this controller, among them the Patriot Hellfire M2 and PNY CS2030.
However they opted for the half-height half-length PCI Express 3.0 x4 form-factor rather than the more compact M.2.
Which begs the question.
Is this just the MP500 on a PCIe adapter card?
Well, it’s a little more than that.
Meanwhile, the MP500 series offers 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities using the M.2-2280 form factor.
Both use the same PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, Phison controller and 15nm MLC NAND flash memory.
So you may be wondering what’s new here?
However this small, compact form factor while very impressive is brutal on the components.
Heat is the main issue here and getting rid of it is the problem.
The simple explanation for this is passive cooling.
Corsair claims the same sequential performance for both the 400GB MX500 and 480GB MP500.
Access time performance is a little off.
Moving to our on-disk copy test results the NX500 again demonstrates MP500-like performance.
It edged ahead in the game copy test, though only by a 5% margin.
Finally, we have the 7-Zip file extraction test which does work with a large 38 GB archive.
Once again the issue here is the asking price.
