Corsair Force Series MP510 960GB Review

Conclusion

When Corsair released the MP500 it fitted very much into where we expected it, and indeed most other M.2 drives, to be. Namely it’s plenty good enough and affordable enough that you wont be disappointed, but the Samsung range is still the unquestioned daddy when it comes to blistering storage speeds.

Now with the release of the MP510 the waters have been muddied considerably.

Where exactly the latest entry into the Corsair Force Series fits into your personal wishlist somewhat depends upon desire to follow the old wisdom that read speeds rule the world, because you pull data from your drive far more often than you write to it. This, of course, isn’t generally the case. Your OS and applications are constantly writing settings, or saving temporary copies of your work, or filling up a cache and so having fast write speeds helps the whole system remain snappy and responsive regardless of what you’re doing. Now if you plan on doing nothing more than installing Windows and some games, playing those games, and little else, then naturally you’ll lean more towards weighting read speeds as the overriding consideration.

The MP510 tested extremely well on our benchmark suite in the read tests. It was so nearly as good as the Samsung 970 range – the M.2 benchmark – that you can clearly see the efforts Corsair have put into refining it have helped tremendously when compared to the MP500. Whether you’re reading off huge sequential files or lots of small ones spread randomly across the NAND, the Corsair MP510 performed at a very high level and will certainly leave you satisfied.

The star of the Force MP510 show is the write speeds. We’ve seen good to great write speeds off a number of drives, but if there is ever a slight area of compromise to obtain the headline, looks good in the advertising copy, speeds then the write ones are that are reduced. With the Corsair MP510 this definitely isn’t the case as it’s the fastest single drive in write bandwidth terms that we’ve reviewed. Regularly topping our write graphs in pretty much all the benchmarks.

When it comes to storage drives the capacity, price and performance are pretty much the only considerations people have. However, it’s worth mentioning that the Corsair MP510 has thick gold coating on the connections to ensure that it lasts for a long time. It might seem inconsequential in a desktop system, but given the bumps and vibrations a laptop has to endure it suddenly takes on new importance. The combination of great build quality, good capacity and blistering speeds in both read and write performance win the Corsair Force Series MP510 960GB our OC3D Enthusiast Award.

  

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