INTRODUCTION

   As we've pointed out quite a few times in the past although SATA III 2.5" and M.2 SSDs (Solid State Drives) are leading the mainstream market in terms of sales thanks to their impressive read and write performance numbers M.2 NVMe SSDs have taken over (with relatively ease for that matter) the high and ultra-high end segments of the market. Solely from a performance standpoint this of course is well justified since there are currently quite a few M.2 NVMe models can surpass 2500MB/s whereas SATA III 2.5" and M.2 models are limited to around 550-600MB/s (and in many cases performance is quite lower than that). Some M.2 NVMe SSD's however are raising the bar even higher by surpassing the 3000MB/s mark and the just now released Force Series MP510 model by CORSAIR is among them.

    Founded in 1994, CORSAIR supplies high-performance products purchased primarily by PC gaming enthusiasts who build their own PCs or buy pre-assembled customized systems. The company's award-winning products include DDR3 and DDR4 memory upgrades, computer cases, PC cooling products, gaming headsets, gaming keyboards, gaming mice, power supply units, USB flash drives, solid-state drives and system monitoring and control devices.

    For the brand new Force Series MP510 NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD (available in 240/480/960/1920GB capacities - however the 960GB model was launched first) CORSAIR has paired the latest high performance controller by Phison (PS5012-E12 / Gen3x4 NVMe 1.3 interface) with Toshiba 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND flash and 1GB DDR4 SDRAM by SKhynix (this combination offers performance of up to 3480MB/s read and 3000MB/s write). The Phison PS5012-E12 controller features a total of eight NAND channels with 32 CE targets, supports up to 8TB of NAND and packs several interesting features aimed at both high performance and reliability including as StrongECC (reconstructs defective/faulty pages when regular ECC fails), SmartRefresh (monitors block ECC health status and refreshes blocks periodically to improve data retention), SmartFlush (minimizes time data spends in cache to ensure data retention in the event of power loss), end-to-end data protection, thermal monitoring, AES-256 encryption and TCG Pyrite/OPAL support (however support for Windows Bitlocker/eDrive is not yet implemented). CORSAIR covers the entire Force MP510 line with a 5-year limited warranty and reports endurance numbers of 400TBW for the 240GB model, 800TBW for the 480GB model, 1700TBW for the 960GB model and 3120TBW for the 1920GB model.