In addition, while 4TB and 8GB drives generally charge a substantial premium per gigabyte over 1TB and 2TB models, that's not the case with the MP600 Core XT: Its 4TB stick costs just a bit more per gig than the lower capacities, with a list price below many 2TB SSDs. Based on Corsair's list prices, in fact, the MP600 Core XT has one of the lowest costs per gigabyte of any M.2 SSD we've reviewed. The design facilitates the creation of higher-capacity M.2 drives (hence the availability of a 4TB version) and is also relatively cost-effective. QLC technology stacks four bits per NAND flash-memory cell. One way this Corsair SSD keeps costs down is omitting a dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) cache, instead enlisting your PC's main memory as a host memory buffer (HMB). (Unfamiliar with M.2 and PCIe jargon? Check out our guide to SSD terminology.) It combines Micron's 176-layer QLC 3D NAND flash memory with a Phison PS5021-E21T controller. The MP600 Core XT is built on an M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) "gumstick" printed circuit board and uses the NVMe 1.4 protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus. Low Price, High Capacity, Reduced Durability Just know that you're trading off write endurance to gain low-cost capacity, in the event you'll put this drive to heavy write duty. But its PCMark 10 scores-which rate an SSD's speed for everyday storage tasks-were on the low side of average, and its 3DMark Storage gaming score was at the bottom of the list. The Core XT met its rated sequential read and write speeds in our tests and was even the fastest in our comparison group at writing small (4K-block-size) files. But the use of QLC also limits its durability long-term for heavy writes. The Core XT's use of quad-level cell (QLC) flash memory keeps the drive's cost down (it's $59.99 for 1TB, or $284.99 for 4TB) and allows relatively high capacity for a budget solid-state drive. This drive is currently the best value flash drive on the market by a long way.Corsair's MP600 Core XT ($114.99 for 2TB as tested) is an internal SSD with midrange speed for a PCI Express 4.0 drive. We will update the price if/when the drive becomes officially available in the UK but until then we have calculated its value rating based on the price we paid (£18 including shipping) from Hong Kong. Our test unit had to be shipped from Hong Kong where we were able to purchase it at at an extremely reasonable price. The SanDisk Extreme has not been released in the UK. The other benchmark observations were all consistent and to date this drive has the highest sequential read we have seen on a 16GB flash drive. We suspect the inconsistency relates to the way the controller batches page cleanup. The SanDisk Extreme achieved a 4K random write speed of 2.1 MB/s which was over three times faster than the best of the rest, unfortunately we were unable to get consistent measurements but 2.1 MB/s was towards the lower end of the range (7.46 MB/s - 1.71 MB/s) we observed. Until now every flash drive we have tested has shown a serious weakness in the area of 4K random writes. The benchmark scores for the SanDisk Extreme were stunning.
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