Corsair MP700 Pro SE vs. Crucial T705 vs. MSI M580 Frozr

The first generation of PCI Express 5.0 SSDs took a long time to arrive and was subsequently received lukewarmly. On the one hand, because some people’s hunger for ever-faster storage has long since been satisfied, but also because the speeds of up to 10GB/s, a third faster than high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs, have not yet really appealed to the imagination. In this review we compare three new PCIe 5.0 SSDs from Corsair, Crucial and MSI, which should be able to achieve much higher speeds, up to almost 15GB/s.

New generation PCIe 5.0 SSDs use faster NAND

With the exception of the Samsung 990 Evo, which uses the PCIe 5.0 standard to save lanes rather than gain speed, all PCIe 5.0 SSDs to date use a Phison PS5026-E26 controller. This also applies to the new Corsair MP700 Pro SE, Crucial T705 and MSI Spatium M580 Frozr that we tested for this article. Also, nothing has changed on paper about the 232-layer TLC-nand used by Micron.

However, until now it has not been possible to drive that flash memory at its intended speed of 2400MT/s. With the first generation of drives this was forced to run at 2000MT/s or even lower. Only now, more than a year after the first PCIe 5.0 drive came onto the market, is it possible. This faster memory automatically increases throughput speeds, although Phison has also made some adjustments to its firmware to further optimize performance.

Manufacturers must make the difference themselves

In terms of specifications, the three SSDs seem largely identical and that is actually true. Corsair and MSI drives even use the exact same firmware version for the Phison controller. The manufacturers must therefore distinguish themselves on other points. Corsair does this, for example, by offering a Hydro X version, which you can connect to custom water cooling. Crucial is the only one that sells its T705 in all capacities without a heatsink, so you can use it directly in a prepared PCIe 5.0 motherboard with the supplied large heatsink. MSI only supplies its Spatium M580 Frozr with a huge passive cooling block, and thus claims to achieve the highest speeds.

We have included all current prices in the table below. In fact, the manufacturers only compete directly with each other on a few models, because Corsair, for example, does not have a 1TB model and is the only water-cooled option.

At the time of writing, MSI’s drive is the most competitively priced; it is even cheaper than the Crucial T705 in its version without heatsink. However, the availability of the Spatium M580 Frozr leaves much to be desired, just as was the case for a long time with its predecessor. The 1TB version is not for sale.

The Corsair MP700 Pro SE will only be available at the time this article appears and its availability has yet to really get going. Moreover, the air-cooled models of the Corsair drive will not appear until next month.