Corsair Force MP600 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Benchmarks On Linux

[josh_walrath]

Samsung PM1633a - 15TB for humble $10k

$0.67/GB, wtf. :C Just take a cheap SSD and solder more smol flash chips to the board!

Corsair does not provide any method to update their products' firmware without using Windows - they don't even provide an operating system agnostic firmware update iso.

Don't support companies that refuse to support your use case.

Same with the Logitech G933 wireless headset. But there's no better wireless headset. Same with everything with a firmware, AFAIK. It's not an easy life in the Linux ghetto, but it's what I signed up for.

[sonnet]

Damn... I expected there to be a decent size jump upwards from PCIe 3.0 drives, but that's considerably better than what I expected.

I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't trust much those results.
tbh I don't trust them at all since the results are pretty much incoherent.

The Samsung 970 pro shouldn't be slower in any test compared to the Samsung 860.
And there should be much difference (in favor of the 970 pro)between those 2 compared to what there could be between a pcie 4.0 and the 970 pro.
Also Optane ...? It should win nearly every test.

PCIe 4.0 drives have been tested already against PCIe 3.0. While the difference in speed is noticeable in certain cases,
it's really not a game-changer, generally speaking,

[Space Heater]

Same with everything with a firmware, AFAIK. It's not an easy life in the Linux ghetto, but it's what I signed up for.

You're just wrong though.
Crucial, Intel, Samsung, Mushkin, Plextor, OCZ/Toshiba, and Sandisk provide os-agnostic SSD firmware updates.
Choosing Corsair or some other vendor is actively voting that you do not care about Linux/non-Windows support.

For computers that support firmware updates on Linux you can look here: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devicelist
Notably Dell and Lenovo business laptops and desktops support firmware updates on Linux.

[Michael]

Also the comparison to 256/512 GB models is not entirely valid, 1/2 TB models are faster in some scenarios. Also would love to see Samsung EVO Plus 2 TB in this benchmark.

Testing was done with what I had. Unfortunately Samsung and most other vendors don't send out review samples to me for Linux testing and thus for my purposes end up usually buying the smaller/cheaper models.

[andrei_me]

I wonder if Optane is bottlenecked by PCIe3 and would see a similar perf improvement using PCIe4

[stormcrow]

For computers that support firmware updates on Linux you can look here: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devicelist

No, that doesn't mean the companies on that list support firmware updates on Linux. They support firmware encapsulation which is an entirely different beast. It's platform agnostic because it's using the board's firmware to update itself. The update program puts the capsule in a place the firmware will recognize. It then tells the firmware to update on next re/boot. This is what Microsoft is pushing as a safe way to update firmware because there's no guarruntees that Windows can do the job properly as it's not a single user, single task environment like MSDOS was.

Notably Dell and Lenovo business laptops and desktops support firmware updates on Linux.

Yes, they do, notably because encapsulation allows them to more easily support multiple environments. It's not because of any great fondness of Linux, however. Enough of their business clients want Linux laptops to support their RHEL running Lenovo ThinkServer and Dell Poweredge servers and writing server applications to make it financially worthwhile.

It's certainly logical and proper to support the companies that create platform agnostic methods of firmware, but not necessarily because they ostensibly support Linux. Rather, the reason is because using Linux, Windows, *BSD, etc is the wrong level to be updating board firmware to begin with. It should be done at the UEFI level, or at the very most a single task OS where the likelihood of race conditions and other shenanagans are remote.

[Space Heater]

No, that doesn't mean the companies on that list support firmware updates on Linux. They support firmware encapsulation which is an entirely different beast. It's platform agnostic because it's using the board's firmware to update itself.

Yes I am fully aware they are using standard UEFI capsule updates, but that doesn't change the fact that you can start this process on Linux rather than having to launch a Windows-only executable to start the process. You're arguing pure semantics, when it comes to many products the *only* reasonable way to start the capsule update is through a win32 program, so it really doesn't matter that it's using something that is platform-agnostic afterwards.

[ThoreauHD]

If samsung, crucial, or intel make one of these, I'll consider it. I need the iso firmware. Running some windows horse shit to update drive firmware ain't gonna happen at home or work.

[dc_coder_84]

I would like to see a comparison of application startup times with these SSDs/HDDs. I assume the optane SSD will perform best because of the hight speed at low queue dephts.

Most Nvme SSDs can only perform best at high queue dephs and I wonder if applications like Firefox can use this potential? Wouldn't that be a good field to improve performance for Firefox?

[Yndoendo]

Corsair does not provide any method to update their products' firmware without using Windows - they don't even provide an operating system agnostic firmware update iso.

Don't support companies that refuse to support your use case.

I was able to upgrade the firmware on my MX200 with Linux.
Just had turn the supplied ISO to be able to be booted with UEFI.

<h2>Unoffical Guide: Firmware Updating via UEFI with reFind</h2>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Say your usb flash drive is <code>/dev/sdg</code>; create a partition with your favorite tool:</p>
<pre>sudo cfdisk /dev/sdg</pre>
<p>Format the drive:</p>
<pre>mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdg1</pre>
<p>Create the boot system:</p>
<pre>sudo refind-install --usedefault /dev/sdg1 --alldrivers</pre>
<p>Mount the partition to file files:</p>
<pre>sudo mount /dev/sdg1 /mnt</pre>
<p>Create the reFind configuration file:</p>
<pre>printf 'menuentry "sd" {\n\tvolume "sd"\n\tloader /boot/vmlinuz\n\tinitrd /boot/core.gz\n\toptions "libata.allow_tpm=1 quiet base loglevel=3 waitusb=10 superuser mse-iso rssd-fw-update rssd-fwdir=/opt/firmware rssd-model=MX200 mse-poweroff \n}\n"' &gt; /mnt/EFI/BOOT/refind.conf</pre>
<p>Copy files from ISO</p>