2TB M.2 NVMe Shootout – Intel 660P vs Corsair MP510

2TB M.2 NVMe Shootout - Intel 660P vs Corsair MP510

Introduction

If you have even a passing interest in computer hardware then you will be aware of a thing called Moore’s Law. This is based upon processor transistor counts and says that they will double every two years. Such has been the success of this law that it has been expanded in general use to the idea that most hardware either doubles in speed or halves in cost every two years.

The pace of CPU and GPU improvements has been tremendous, but the original idea behind Moore’s Law is actually slowing down somewhat. After all, a (for example) Intel Core i7-2600K was a 3.4GHz quad core CPU and processors that cost the same as the launch price of that CPU – £300 – are the six core 3.6 GHz i5-8600K or the 4.3 GHz eight core AMD Ryzen 2700X. So things have moved on, but it’s taken eight years to double the core count. Hardly in keeping with the ethos of Moore’s Law in real world terms, even if the transistor counts have exploded from the 700 million of the i7-2600K to the 5 billion of the Ryzen 2700X. Still not quite double every two years.

What has that to do with today’s review you ask. Well, if there is one area where the de facto implementation of Moore’s Law not only holds up but is actually annihilated it’s the world of storage drives. If we return to the launch date of the i7-2600K we find a that £300 would buy you a 64GB SSD that had read speeds of 151 MB/s and write speeds around the 100 MB/s mark. For the same money today you can get the Corsair MP510 1920GB M.2 drive we have for review which threatens the 3000 MB/s read and write barrier. So in the same time that CPUs have just about doubled in core count storage drives have thirty times the capacity and twenty times the speed for the same money. If that doesn’t set your trousers on fire with surprise then we don’t know what to tell you.

If it wasn’t enough that the capacity and speed side of things was comfortably better than predicted by that law, so the price has also seen some serious slashing in recent times. Early 2TB M.2 drives were very much at the high end of two thousand pounds and it took a long time before they became remotely affordable for the average enthusiast, let alone a mainstream user. But here we are with two drives that both sport 2TB capacity, and both seriously undercut the pricing of the Samsung 970 2TB we’ve previously reviewed. It seems like the perfect opportunity to discover exactly how much performance you can get for your outlay, so those of you on very tight budgets can decide which on the price/performance scale best suits your requirements.

Technical Specifications

With a substantial price difference between the two drives it is understandable that the rated specifications of the Intel 660P are lower in both IOPS and raw throughput than the Corsair MP510. Like all things though it’s a matter of putting them into our test system and discovering how they perform in the real world, rather than on paper.

Intel 660P

2TB M.2 NVMe Shootout - Intel 660P vs Corsair MP510  

Corsair MP510

2TB M.2 NVMe Shootout - Intel 660P vs Corsair MP510 Â