Corsair today introduced its upcoming MP600 Pro series of high-speed SSDs, ,and a few SKUs have gone up for preorder on Newegg. Among them is the MP600 Pro Hydro X for users with custom liquid cooling loops.
The Hydro X variant comes with a water block attached to make it easy to slot into a liquid cooling loop "and achieve maximum performance." In theory, liquid cooling an SSD (and specifically the controller chip) should help maintain peak speeds for longer periods of time, before throttling kicks in (incidentally, Corsair intends to make available the Hydro X water block as a standalone purchase too, for use with any M.2 form factor SSD).
To that end, the MP600 Pro and MP600 Pro Hydro X leverage Phison's latest PS5018-E18 controller to deliver up to 7,000Mbps of sequential read performance and up to 6,550Mbps of sequential write performance, according to Corsair's rated specifications.
We have not tested the new drives yet, so we'll have to wait and see how they actually perform in real-world workloads. Regardless, you will need a motherboard and CPU that support PCI Express 4.0 to take full advantage of the hyper-fast speed capabilities. At the moment, that means an X570 or B550 motherboard paired with a Zen 2 (Ryzen 3000) or Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000) desktop CPU, at least until Intel's Rocket Lake-S chips arrive.
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Initial pricing is pretty decent for a PCIe 4.0 model that is rated to push read speeds into 7,000Mbps territory, even for the version with a water block—the MP600 Pro Hydro X in 2TB form is up for preorder for $460 at Newegg.
That's obviously not cheap for a 2TB SSD, but it is generally in line with what the fastest models command right now. For example, WD's new Black SN850 is priced at $450 for 2TB on Amazon, and that's without any heatsink whatsoever.
For those who can do without the water block—most of you, I imagine—the regular MP600 Pro is also available to preorder, priced at $435 for 2TB and $225 for 1TB.
