MSI Enters The SSD Market With The Spatium M480

Familiar Parts In A New Package

MSI’s first PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive is the Spatium M480, using the same Phison PS5018-E18 controller we’ve seen in the Inland Performance Plus and Gigabyte Aorus 7000s, Micron 96-Layer 3D TLC and a 2GB cache of DDR4-2666.  It ships in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB models and has a five year warranty, with an expected 1400 TBW lifespan.   The top of the drive is a large, removable heatsink so you can decide if you prefer to keep it on or replace it with one from your motherboard.

In the Guru of 3D’s testing they saw sequential reads occasionally breaking 7000MB/s with sequential writes just a hair slower.  The sustained speeds were also very impressive for a TLC drive, which was lovely to see.  You will want to ensure that you make use of a heatsink however, as there was significant thermal throttling when running the drive naked.

The 2TB drive will hit the market at around $400, a bit more than some of the competition so you can expect that cost to quickly change to match similar E18 drives on the market.  If that is more than you wanted to spend they also released a lower cost Spatium M470 with an E16 controller, which is reviewed below.