Corsair's recent SSDs have all been based on Phison's turnkey SSD solutions, where Corsair specifies how the drive will look, but the internals of the drive are essentially identical to those of a dozen other brands. Using turnkey solutions like this is by far the easiest and least risky way for a brand to ship SSDs, but it leaves very little room for product differentiation. Corsair's Neutron XTi and Force LE SATA drives and their Force MP500 M.2 NVMe SSD don't offer anything unique under Corsair's sticker. The new Corsair Neutron NX500 uses the same Phison E7 controller as the MP500, but it aims to stand out from the crowd.

The Corsair Neutron NX500 is not the first retail Phison E7 SSD to use the PCIe add-in card form factor with a heatsink, but it is the first to reserve a very large spare area, leaving just 400GB usable space on our sample compared to the typical 480GB. This kind of high overprovisioning ratio is usually only found on enterprise SSDs intended for write-heavy workloads. We saw these oddball capacities with the Intel SSD 750, but there it was due in part to Intel's 18-channel controller compared to 4 or 8 channels on most consumer drives. The Corsair NX500 actually has substantially more overprovisioning than the Intel SSD 750.

The custom heatsink makes the Corsiar Neutron NX500 visually quite distinct as it carries typical Corsair styling cues. The PCIe bracket is perforated with triangular vents that match the Corsair ONE's side panels, while the rest of the drive is decked in variations on black. We know from our past testing of Phison E7 drives that the heatsink's role is more aesthetic than functional, but as the heaviest SSD heatsink I've yet encountered it should guarantee that the controller stays cool. The NX500 does not include any thermal pads between the heatsink and the flash memory, and there are no thermal pads between the drive and the backplate. The faux carbon fiber plastic shroud over part of the NX500's heatsink could theoretically detract from its cooling capacity, but the wattage of the Phison E7 chip is far too low to for that to matter.

The PCB under the NX500's heatsink is barely modified from the Phison reference design. It does actually bear Corsair's name, but the overall layout is identical to all the other Phison E7 PCIe cards we've seen, right down to the unpopulated solder pads for power loss protection capacitors—both cylindrical through-hole capacitors and surface-mount solid capacitors are provided for. A custom PCB half the size could have worked without making the board crowded. The flash is the usual Toshiba 15nm MLC. The NX500 is equipped with twice as much DRAM as is typical for a SSD with this much NAND flash.

Corsair Neutron NX500 Specifications Comparison
Capacity	400GB	800GB
Controller	Phison PS5007-E7
NAND Flash	Toshiba 15nm MLC
DRAM Cache	1 GB DDR3	2 GB DDR3
Sequential Read	2800 MB/s	2800 MB/s
Sequential Write	1600 MB/s	1600 MB/s
Random Read IOPS	300k	300k
Random Write IOPS	270k	270k
Form Factor	PCIe x4 HHHL	PCIe x4 HHHL
Write Endurance	698 TB (1 DWPD)	1396 TB (1 DWPD)
Warranty	5 years	5 years
Launch MSRP	$319.99	$659.99

Quite unsurprisingly given the overprovisioning situation, the Corsair Neutron NX500 comes with a firmware version we have not previously encountered on other Phison E7 products. The NX500 ships with firmware version E7FM04.5, which I'll abbreviate as version 4.5. We've previously dealt with versions 1.0, 2.0 and 2.1, and an upcoming review will feature a 240GB drive using version 3.6.

An NVMe SSD in the PCIe add-in card form factor with a big heatsink and using MLC NAND is obviously a niche product for the high end of the market. It makes sense that Corsair's starting the NX500 line with 400GB and 800GB capacities while the more mainstream MP500 M.2 SSD ranges from 120GB to 480GB. Corsair rates the NX500 with a total write endurance of 698TB for the 400GB model (the same as their 480GB MP500) and 1396TB for the 800GB model, but the NX500 comes with a five-year warranty compared to the MP500's three years.

This review has two goals: to compare the NX500's overprovisioning and other firmware changes against earlier Phison E7 drives, and to compare the NX500 against the broader field of current NVMe SSDs with similar capacities. The other drives considered in this review includes:

• Patriot Hellfire M.2 480GB, Phison E7 with firmware version 2.1
• Zotac SONIX 480GB, add-in card Phison E7 with firmware version 1.0
• Plextor M8PeY 512GB and Toshiba OCZ RD400A 512GB, two M.2 SSDs in add-in card adapters for cooling purposes, both using the same Toshiba 15nm MLC but with controllers other than the Phison E7
• Samsung 950 PRO 512GB and 960 EVO 1TB. We don't have samples of the 512GB 960 PRO or 500GB 960 EVO, so these are the closest Samsung equivalents we can provide at the moment.
• WD Black 512GB and Intel SSD 600p 512GB, entry-level M.2 NVMe SSDs using TLC NAND. One of these is usually the cheapest NVMe SSD available at any given moment.
• Samsung 850 PRO 512GB, representing the high end of the SATA SSD market

AnandTech 2017 SSD Testbed
CPU	Intel Xeon E3 1240 v5
Motherboard	ASRock Fatal1ty E3V5 Performance Gaming/OC
Chipset	Intel C232
Memory	4x 8GB G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR4-2400 CL15
Graphics	AMD Radeon HD 5450, 1920x1200@60Hz
Software	Windows 10 x64, version 1703
	Linux kernel version 4.12, fio version 2.21

• Thanks to Intel for the Xeon E3 1240 v5 CPU
• Thanks to ASRock for the E3V5 Performance Gaming/OC
• Thanks to G.SKILL for the Ripjaws DDR4-2400 RAM
• Thanks to Corsair for the RM750 power supply, Carbide 200R case, and Hydro H60 CPU cooler

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The NX500's average data rate on The Destroyer is clearly faster than the other Phison E7 drives, but still far slower than competing MLC NVMe SSDs. The Plextor M8Pe and OCZ RD400 offer much higher performance from the same 15nm MLC NAND.

The NX500 offers the best average latency on The Destroyer among the Phison E7 drives. The 99th percentile latencies are quite different, with the Zotac SONIX outperforming the Corsair NX500, while the Patriot Hellfire is clearly having problems keeping latency under control.

Splitting the average latency by reads and writes doesn't reveal any surprises among the Phison drives, but there are a few differences in the rankings of the other drives. The Intel 600p stands out as the only drive that has a real problem with write latency even in the average case.

The 99th percentile latencies show interesting differences between the Phison drives in how they handle reads and writes. The Zotac SONIX has the best 99th percentile read latency among the Phison E7 drives and places pretty well among the overall field of competitors. The Corsair Neutron NX500 is substantially slower, while the Patriot Hellfire's 99th percentile read latency is worse than any other NVMe drive on this chart.

The 99th percentile write latencies are all rather slow on the Phison E7 drives, but the Corsair NX500 is the best of the three at keeping write latency low. This is to be expected given the greater spare area the NX500 has to work with, but the impact of that much extra overprovisioning on write QoS ought to be more significant.

The Corsair Neutron NX500 and Zotac SONIX are at a bit of a disadvantage compared to the M.2 drives here since the NX500 and SONIX add-in cards draw power from the 12V supply and thus include more voltage regulation circuitry than the M.2 SSDs. The NX500 is further disadvantaged by having more DRAM to power. However, even the Patriot Hellfire M.2 can't come close to the 3D NAND SSDs from Samsung and Toshiba. Surprisingly, the most efficient planar NAND SSD in this bunch is the Plextor M8PeY, which was flashing its red LEDs during the entire test.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy

Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.

The Corsair Neutron NX500 delivers a better average data rate on the Heavy test than the other Phison drives, especially when the test is run on a full drive, a case that the Patriot Hellfire handles particularly badly. The other MLC-based NVMe SSDs all perform better than the NX500.

The average latency provided by the NX500 on the Heavy test is only modestly slower than the competing drives using the same NAND but different controllers. Against the other Phison drives that differ primarily in firmware, the NX500 is the fastest. When considering 99th percentile latencies the Patriot Hellfire slightly outperforms the NX500 when the test is run on an empty drive, and the overall spread of scores between the Phison drives and the fastest drives in this bunch is a bit smaller.

The average read latency of the NX500 on the Heavy test is pretty good: only about 20-30µs slower than the fastest 15nm MLC drive, and Samsung's 950 PRO is only a little bit faster than that. The average write latency of the NX500 and the other Phison E7 drives is more than twice as high than the best 3D NAND SSDs, and substantially worse than the other 15nm MLC drives.

As with the average latencies, the 99th percentile read latency of the NX500 is pretty good while on the write side it's slower than average, but not horrible. The Zotac SONIX is the slowest of the three Phison drives, but also the one with the least performance drop when the Heavy test is run on a full drive.

The NX500 on the Heavy test again comes in last place for power efficiency, with the Zotac SONIX only slightly beating it. The Patriot Hellfire's power consumption score is good by the standards of planar NAND PCIe SSDs.

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.

On the Light test, the Corsair Neutron NX500's average data rate is slightly slower than the other two Phison E7 drives, and more substantially behind the other MLC NVMe SSDs. Of the three Phison E7 drives, the NX500 fares the best when the drive is full.

The average latency rankings are almost identical to the average data rate rankings, except that the WD Black has jumped ahead of the Phison E7 drives. For 99th percentile latency, the NX500 performs better than the Zotac SONIX but is only faster than the Patriot Hellfire or WD Black when the test is run on a full drive.

The differences in average read and write latency between the Phison E7 drives are pretty much negligible, and their read latencies are pretty close to the competition. The average write latencies are clearly higher than almost all the competing NVMe SSDs.

The best NVMe SSDs provide 99th percentile read latencies that are half of what the Phison E7 drives provide, when the test is run on an empty drive. When the drive is full, the 99th percentile read latency of even the 3D TLC-based drives worsens to the level of the Phison E7 drives, leaving only a few MLC-based drives with any significant advantage. On the write side, the three Phison E7 drives perform similarly, and the top NVMe SSDs offer 99th percentile write latencies that are barely more than a tenth as long as the NX500's.

The NX500 is again in last place for energy efficiency, but the OCZ RD400A and Zotac SONIX are very close, and only the drives with 3D NAND are substantially more efficient.

Random Read Performance

Our first test of random read performance uses very short bursts of operations issued one at a time with no queuing. The drives are given enough idle time between bursts to yield an overall duty cycle of 20%, so thermal throttling is impossible. Each burst consists of a total of 32MB of 4kB random reads, from a 16GB span of the disk. The total data read is 1GB.

The QD1 burst random read speeds of the Phison E7 drives are all over the chart. The Corsair Neutron NX500 ranks just above the middle, while the Patriot Hellfire is the second-fastest drive in the bunch. With the exception of the underperforming Zotac SONIX and the SATA-based 850 PRO, this chart shows clear separation between the MLC and TLC drives.

Our sustained random read performance is similar to the random read test from our 2015 test suite: queue depths from 1 to 32 are tested, and the average performance and power efficiency across QD1, QD2 and QD4 are reported as the primary scores. Each queue depth is tested for one minute or 32GB of data transferred, whichever is shorter. After each queue depth is tested, the drive is given up to one minute to cool off so that the higher queue depths are unlikely to be affected by accumulated heat build-up. The individual read operations are again 4kB, and cover a 64GB span of the drive.

On a longer test that includes some moderately higher queue depths, the NX500 comes out on top among the Phison E7 drives, but it is a bit below average compared to the market as a whole.

The power efficiency of the NX500 is not quite competitive with the Patriot Hellfire M.2, and nowhere close to most of the 3D NAND SSDs.

Corsair Neutron NX500 400GBIntel SSD 600p 512GBSamsung 950 PRO 512GBSamsung 960 EVO 1TBPatriot Hellfire 480GBWestern Digital WD Black 512GBToshiba XG5 1TBPlextor M8PeY 512GBOCZ RD400A 512GBZotac SONIX 480GBSamsung 850 PRO 512GB

The Corsair Neutron NX500's random read performance scales at higher queue depths much better than the other Phison E7 SSDs, but even at QD32 it is slower than Toshiba's own OCZ RD400 using the same NAND.

Random Write Performance

Our test of random write burst performance is structured similarly to the random read burst test, but each burst is only 4MB and the total test length is 128MB. The 4kB random write operations are distributed over a 16GB span of the drive, and the operations are issued one at a time with no queuing.

The burst random write speed of the Corsair Neutron NX500 is far below what it should be. Both of the other Phison E7 drives are substantially faster and yet still slower than even the Intel SSD 600p.

As with the sustained random read test, our sustained 4kB random write test runs for up to one minute or 32GB per queue depth, covering a 64GB span of the drive and giving the drive up to 1 minute of idle time between queue depths to allow for write caches to be flushed and for the drive to cool down.

With a longer test and bringing in some higher queue depths, the Intel 600P and WD Black fall below the NX500, but the NX500 is still performing much worse than the other Phison E7 SSDs or any other MLC NVMe SSD. The Patriot Hellfire is basically tied for second place behind Samsung.

The NX500's power efficiency during random writes isn't great, but it's only slightly worse than some of the competing NVMe MLC drives and is substantially better than the entry-level NVMe TLC drives.

Corsair Neutron NX500 400GBIntel SSD 600p 512GBSamsung 950 PRO 512GBSamsung 960 EVO 1TBPatriot Hellfire 480GBWestern Digital WD Black 512GBToshiba XG5 1TBPlextor M8PeY 512GBOCZ RD400A 512GBZotac SONIX 480GBSamsung 850 PRO 512GB

The NX500's random write speed does reach decent levels at queue depths of 8 or higher, but at the low queue depths that matter for real-world desktop performance, the NX500 is way behind.

Sequential Read Performance

Our first test of sequential read performance uses short bursts of 128MB, issued as 128kB operations with no queuing. The test averages performance across eight bursts for a total of 1GB of data transferred from a drive containing 16GB of data. Between each burst the drive is given enough idle time to keep the overall duty cycle at 20%.

The QD1 burst sequential read speed of the Corsair Neutron NX500 is a bit slower than the Patriot Hellfire, and quite a bit slower than the Plextor M8Pe. The Samsung NVMe drives are in a completely different league with QD1 read speeds more than twice as fast as any competitor.

Our test of sustained sequential reads uses queue depths from 1 to 32, with the performance and power scores computed as the average of QD1, QD2 and QD4. Each queue depth is tested for up to one minute or 32GB transferred, from a drive containing 64GB of data.

In the longer test that includes some higher queue depths, the NX500's sequential read speed is respectable and basically tied for the fastest non-Samsung drive in the bunch. It is also clearly faster than the other two Phison E7 drives.

The power efficiency of the NX500 during sequential reads is the best among the NVMe SSDs using planar NAND, and the other two Phison E7 drives follow the NX500 in the rankings. Samsung and Toshiba's 3D NAND NVMe drives offer much higher power efficiency.

Corsair Neutron NX500 400GBIntel SSD 600p 512GBSamsung 950 PRO 512GBSamsung 960 EVO 1TBPatriot Hellfire 480GBWestern Digital WD Black 512GBToshiba XG5 1TBPlextor M8PeY 512GBOCZ RD400A 512GBZotac SONIX 480GBSamsung 850 PRO 512GB

From QD1 speeds barely faster than a SATA link and half as fast as most NVMe competition, the NX500 eventually scales up to a decent saturation speed of around 1.2GB/s at QD8 or higher. Unfortunately, Samsung delivers better performance than this even at QD1, though the 960 EVO only barely so, and the 500GB version might not be quite as fast.

Sequential Write Performance

Our test of sequential write burst performance is structured identically to the sequential read burst performance test save for the direction of the data transfer. Each burst writes 128MB as 128kB operations issued at QD1, for a total of 1GB of data written to a drive containing 16GB of data.

The Corsair Neutron NX500's burst sequential write speed is the slowest of the three Phison E7 drives, but only barely and the performance is still decent for a planar NAND drive.

Our test of sustained sequential writes is structured identically to our sustained sequential read test, save for the direction of the data transfers. Queue depths range from 1 to 32 and each queue depth is tested for up to one minute or 32GB, followed by up to one minute of idle time for the drive to cool off and perform garbage collection. The test is confined to a 64GB span of the drive.

With a longer test, the Phison E7 drives hold on to their rankings though the NX500 is still the slowest of the three by a hair. Samsung's drives offer far higher sequential write speeds, but the rest of the competitors are clearly slower than the NX500.

The NX500's power efficiency during sequential writes is a bit worse than the Patriot Hellfire, but otherwise it is only beat by Samsung's NVMe drives. The next most efficient drive is the Toshiba XG5, which like Samsung's drives has the benefit of 3D NAND.

Corsair Neutron NX500 400GBIntel SSD 600p 512GBSamsung 950 PRO 512GBSamsung 960 EVO 1TBPatriot Hellfire 480GBWestern Digital WD Black 512GBToshiba XG5 1TBPlextor M8PeY 512GBOCZ RD400A 512GBZotac SONIX 480GBSamsung 850 PRO 512GB

The performance and power consumption of the Corsair Neutron NX500 during sequential writes barely changes with queue depth. The Samsung 960 EVO 1TB is more than twice as fast at QD2 or higher, so it is a very safe bet that even the 500GB version of the 960 EVO would have a significant advantage over the NX500 here.

Mixed Random Performance

Our test of mixed random reads and writes covers mixes varying from pure reads to pure writes at 10% increments. Each mix is tested for up to 1 minute or 32GB of data transferred. The test is conducted with a queue depth of 4, and is limited to a 64GB span of the drive. In between each mix, the drive is given idle time of up to one minute so that the overall duty cycle is 50%.

The QD4 mixed random I/O performance of the Corsair Neutron NX500 is pretty good overall, but the Patriot Hellfire has a clear advantage. The Zotac SONIX on the other hand can't beat the SATA-based Samsung 850 PRO and is only slightly faster than the Intel 600p.

The power efficiency of the NX500 during the mixed random I/O test is about average, while the faster Patriot Hellfire beating all the other planar NAND SSDs in this bunch.

Corsair Neutron NX500 400GBIntel SSD 600p 512GBSamsung 950 PRO 512GBSamsung 960 EVO 1TBPatriot Hellfire 480GBWestern Digital WD Black 512GBToshiba XG5 1TBPlextor M8PeY 512GBOCZ RD400A 512GBZotac SONIX 480GBSamsung 850 PRO 512GB

The performance of the Neutron NX500 increases gradually as the portion of writes increases, not dropping anywhere along the way but also not spiking very high in the final phase of the test where many drives improve greatly.

Mixed Sequential Performance

Our test of mixed sequential reads and writes differs from the mixed random I/O test by performing 128kB sequential accesses rather than 4kB accesses at random locations, and the sequential test is conducted at queue depth 1. The range of mixes tested is the same, and the timing and limits on data transfers are also the same as above.

The mixed sequential performance of the Corsair Neutron NX500 is poor, with it and the Patriot Hellfire performing slightly worse than the SATA-based Samsung 850 PRO and only beating the entry-level TLC NVMe drives. The Zotac SONIX on the other hand performed quite well, though still a bit slower than what the OCZ RD400A manages using the same NAND.

The power efficiency of the NX500 and Patriot Hellfire rank no better than their overall performance on the mixed sequential test, and the Zotac SONIX is only modestly better off.

Corsair Neutron NX500 400GBIntel SSD 600p 512GBSamsung 950 PRO 512GBSamsung 960 EVO 1TBPatriot Hellfire 480GBWestern Digital WD Black 512GBToshiba XG5 1TBPlextor M8PeY 512GBOCZ RD400A 512GBZotac SONIX 480GBSamsung 850 PRO 512GB

The NX500's performance on the mixed sequential test bottoms out with 70/30 and 60/40 read/write mixtures, but then shows good improvement as the proportion of writes continues to increase. Most of the MLC drives are able to avoid the performance drop that the NX500 suffers in the early phases of this test, which is what leads to the Zotac SONIX scoring so much better than the NX500.

Power Management

Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.

Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.

We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.

The active idle power consumption of the NX500 is clearly higher than the other two Phison E7 drives, most likely due to the extra DRAM on the NX500. Idle power saving modes are still broken with the combination of this testbed and the Phison E7, but at least the NX500 isn't drawing as much power as the Patriot Hellfire did. Given the intended audience, it is unlikely that NX500 users would even attempt to use the low power modes.

With no drive-level sleep state to wake up from, the idle wake-up latency of the NX500 is the minimal time it takes to switch the PCIe link back to full power.

Final Words

The Phison E7 NVMe SSD platform has provided us with a very interesting case study of the effects SSD controller firmware can have on the performance of drives with almost identical hardware. All Phison E7 drives on the market use Toshiba 15nm MLC NAND. The firmware has evolved significantly since the first retail release in the spring of 2016, but it has not produced an across the board improvement in performance.

On our ATSB tests of real-world desktop storage workloads, the NX500's best showing was on the Heavy test, the most write-intensive of the three. Digging deeper, our ATSB tests show the NX500 is generally slower than its siblings for writes, though often fastest of the three for reads. This is not where we expected its strengths to lie, though the benefits of the large spare area do show up in the relatively small performance hit the NX500 suffers when the tests are conducted on a full drive.

The NX500 is at its best with sustained high queue depths. It's reasonable for a drive with this much overprovisioning to take other measures to optimize for heavy workloads, but clearly the NX500 overshot any sensible consumer workload target. Even the heaviest desktop workloads don't reach QD32 very often, and their overall performance is determined primarily by how the drive behaves at low queue depths. At lower queue depths, the NX500 mostly fails to deliver.

Our synthetic tests mostly mirror the ATSB tests in showing lackluster write performance compared to how the NX500 ranks on the read speed tests. The sequential write speed of the NX500 is pretty good in the grand scheme of things, but the other two Phison E7 drives are slightly faster still.

The Corsair Neutron NX500 consistently scores poorly on power efficiency. Since it is a desktop-only drive and only consumes a few Watts at most, this is insignificant. One contributing factor is that the NX500 has twice as much DRAM as is typical for its flash capacity, providing a small but constant extra power draw that apparently doesn't do much for performance.

I suspect the firmware used on the NX500 borrows some more from Phison's enterprise SSD firmware than the Patriot Hellfire's firmware does. The Hellfire's performance clearly suffers greatly when the drive is full, more so than either of the other two Phison E7 drives we've tested, and more than most MLC SSDs. The Patriot Hellfire's ranking tends to be better on our short burst I/O tests at QD1 than on the sustained tests. All of those are common characteristics to see on consumer drives that sacrifice some high-end performance for the sake of better real-world performance. The Corsair Neutron NX500 isn't a clear loser on all of the real-world and low queue depth tests, indicating that it hasn't completely sacrificed consumer performance optimization in the pursuit of higher synthetic benchmark scores.

	250-256GB	400-512GB	800-1024GB	1.6-2TB
Corsair Neutron NX500		$319.99 (80¢/GB)	$649.99 (81¢/GB)	TBA
Samsung 960 EVO	$142.84 (51¢/GB)	$234.00 (47¢/GB)	$477.99 (46¢/GB)
Samsung 960 PRO		$299.99 (59¢/GB)	$579.99 (57¢/GB)	$1129 (55¢/GB)
Intel SSD 600p	$165.59 (65¢/GB)	$212.99 (42¢/GB)	$355.00 (35¢/GB)
WD Black	$109.99 (43¢/GB)	$198.98 (39¢/GB)

While the tradeoffs of different Phison E7 firmwares are interesting, they're not too relevant to the current state of the market. All consumer PCIe SSDs using planar MLC NAND flash are squeezed between cheap TLC drives like the WD Black and Intel 600p, and Samsung's 960 EVO which offers better real-world performance than pretty much everything except the 960 PRO. At the moment, the price spread is a mere $35: from 39¢/GB for the WD Black up to 47¢/GB for the 960 EVO. It's hard to argue that there's any room for a product to carve out a niche somewhere in that small range. Based on performance alone, the Corsair Neutron NX500's MSRP is about twice what its actual retail price ought to be. But even with a massive price cut, the NX500 will need to rely on aesthetics and brand loyalty to sell.