MSI Spatium M570 Pro Frozr 2 TB

[W1zzard]

The MSI Spatium M570 Pro Frozr comes with a big cooling solution that features three heatpipes. Even without a fan, it kept the drive very cool during all testing in our review, there was no thermal throttling. Performance is excellent, too, thanks to a speed rating for up to 12 GB/s.

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[Chaitanya]

Unless controllers mature, these PCI-e 5 SSDs should have been built using U.2/3 form factor. Also good to see MSI using a decent sized heatsink to tame the beast.

 

[Onasi]

Impressive in terms of sheer theoretical grunt, but in practice there is still no real benefit to 99.9% of users over a Gen 4 or even Gen 3 drive and definitely none that would make the insane cooling requirements palatable. If there was an appreciable random R/W uplift it may have been something to consider, but there isn’t.
What I’m saying is that someone should tale another crack at Optane-like technology, obviously. That’s mostly wishful thinking, of course, but at least that was something different. But not like anyone with a remotely modern SSD will complain that his system is slow anyway.

 

[theouto]

I think PCIe Gen 5 SSD's need to mature a bit before we actually start using them I mean look at the size of that heatsink, monstrous. Besides, there's no real use for them (for the average user anyway)

 

[bug]

It's a good thing we left behind those bulky SATA drives and moved to these more compact and elegant solutions
Also, I have just got a 4TB drive for ~$200, so ~50% more for half the capacity... hard pass.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

Unless controllers mature, these PCI-e 5 SSDs should have been built using U.2/3 form factor. Also good to see MSI using a decent sized heatsink to tame the beast.

Many do. However U.2 bombed for consumer grade products as you can't put it in a laptop and even when gaming motherboards shipped with the connectors gamers weren't buying U.2 drives.

 

[Xuper]

So only controller gets hot ? Not Flash chips / DRAM chip?

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

So only controller gets hot ? Not Flash chips / DRAM chip?

The controller has always been the problem child in these. It's only gotten worse as speeds have increased.

 

[Wirko]

This is not M.2. At over 7 centimetres tall, it's M.2x7 ... at least.

Here's info from MSI about the physical size:

94.80mm (L) x 24.00mm (W) x 71.65mm (H)
Recommended installation space: up to 22 x 110 mm available

So it's not really 2280, either.

 

[Chrispy_]

We need a new metric just for all the E26 drives:

Performance per size of heatsink

 

[YashaAstora]

In all honesty: if these things need this much cooling, then just use mini versions of gpu coolers on them, sheesh. Throw on a tiny heatsink with two itty bitty fans instead of this ridiculous passive cooler.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

In all honesty: if these things need this much cooling, then just use mini versions of gpu coolers on them, sheesh. Throw on a tiny heatsink with two itty bitty fans instead of this ridiculous passive cooler.

People hate small fans for good reasons. They either die or are delta level screamers. It's fine for professional or enterprise applications where you can use screamers for but for casual/hobby stuff that's not important, aka muh PC g4m1ng, it's silly.

The problem is not the controllers or the speed. The problem is muh PC g4m1ng and it's always been that with a lot of issues on consumer PCs.

 

[Chrispy_]

People hate small fans for good reasons. They either die or are delta level screamers. It's fine for professional or enterprise applications where you can use screamers for but for casual/hobby stuff that's not important, aka muh PC g4m1ng, it's silly.

The problem is not the controllers or the speed. The problem is muh PC g4m1ng and it's always been that with a lot of issues on consumer PCs.

It's not even that; "PC gaming" is a laptop majority. Us desktop users are a dying breed with gaming laptops outselling dGPUs almost 2:1...

Laptops and PCIe 5.0 SSDs are currently incompatible, thanks to the heatsink size requirement - and outside of video editing loads, its hard to push even PCI 3.0 SSDs to their transfer rate limits.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

It's not even that; "PC gaming" is a laptop majority. Us desktop users are a dying breed with gaming laptops outselling dGPUs almost 2:1...

Laptops and PCIe 5.0 SSDs are currently incompatible, thanks to the heatsink size requirement - and outside of video editing loads, its hard to push even PCI 3.0 SSDs to their transfer rate limits.

Oh entirely, desktops are the horse and buggy of computing. That said I have one because I work on it, but most of my drives are U.2 form factor.

 

[evernessince]

It's not even that; "PC gaming" is a laptop majority. Us desktop users are a dying breed with gaming laptops outselling dGPUs almost 2:1...

Laptops and PCIe 5.0 SSDs are currently incompatible, thanks to the heatsink size requirement - and outside of video editing loads, its hard to push even PCI 3.0 SSDs to their transfer rate limits.

I wouldn't say they are incompatible per say, you could always build the shell to conduct the heat from the SSD or add a heatpipe to the SSD from the existing CPU / GPU cooling solution. It just doesn't make a lot of sense for the manufacturer to go through that given current power consumption except for maybe high end production systems. As you pointed out, even PCIe 3.0 rates are good enough for the vast majority of users. That's a good thing IMO, if modern apps had a higher burst read / write requirement it would cause performance issues for a whole host of people including increased demand on the CPU as burst read / writes are executed vs spreading that IO out over time.

Many do. However U.2 bombed for consumer grade products as you can't put it in a laptop and even when gaming motherboards shipped with the connectors gamers weren't buying U.2 drives.

You can't expect consumers to buy products that aren't advertised to them. As far as I'm aware there are no U.2 drives on the market targeted at consumers. People searching for 8TB SSDs will find consumer drives, you really have to already know to look for enterprise capacities like 7.62TB in order to find them. In addition the cable naming for U.2 drives can be extremely confusing to the average consumer. Again all the cables are designed for enterprise use. Higher speeds are also a problem for consumer U.2 use as well. PCIe 4.0 U.2 only works with carrier cards or very short or expensive cables with redrivers. PCIe 5.0 just straight up will throw a ton of errors which is why in the enterprise they are plugged directly into the backplane. I don't really remember any big push for U.2 on consumer boards either and I've bought a new high-end motherboard almost every gen. There are a few motherboards that have it but there's been no comprehensive push in the ecosystem to adopt u.2 for desktop. TBH I'm not really sure desktop needs it. You can always convert an M.2 / PCIe slot to U.2 if you need

 

[Dimitriman]

That heatsink man...

I can't even...

 

[Sunlight91]

I can't imagine Samsung to release an SSD with such a monstrosity. Now I understand why they released the 990 Pro as "only" PCIe4 even though PCIe5 wasn't far away.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

I wouldn't say they are incompatible per say, you could always build the shell to conduct the heat from the SSD or add a heatpipe to the SSD from the existing CPU / GPU cooling solution. It just doesn't make a lot of sense for the manufacturer to go through that given current power consumption except for maybe high end production systems. As you pointed out, even PCIe 3.0 rates are good enough for the vast majority of users. That's a good thing IMO, if modern apps had a higher burst read / write requirement it would cause performance issues for a whole host of people including increased demand on the CPU as burst read / writes are executed vs spreading that IO out over time.



You can't expect consumers to buy products that aren't advertised to them. As far as I'm aware there are no U.2 drives on the market targeted at consumers. People searching for 8TB SSDs will find consumer drives, you really have to already know to look for enterprise capacities like 7.62TB in order to find them. In addition the cable naming for U.2 drives can be extremely confusing to the average consumer. Again all the cables are designed for enterprise use. Higher speeds are also a problem for consumer U.2 use as well. PCIe 4.0 U.2 only works with carrier cards or very short or expensive cables with redrivers. PCIe 5.0 just straight up will throw a ton of errors which is why in the enterprise they are plugged directly into the backplane. I don't really remember any big push for U.2 on consumer boards either and I've bought a new high-end motherboard almost every gen. There are a few motherboards that have it but there's been no comprehensive push in the ecosystem to adopt u.2 for desktop. TBH I'm not really sure desktop needs it. You can always convert an M.2 / PCIe slot to U.2 if you need

Consumers rejected U.2 drives. Both intel and samsung tried but they were turned down. Gaming boards used to sell with U.2 ports and gamers ran screaming away from them because it wasn't as easy to make "muh g4m1ng PC" look cool to post pictures of with windowed cases.

PC g4m1ng stuck again and fucked it all up. As is the normal.

 

[Rowsol]

For some perspective, the Lexar NM790 that scores 1% slower is $50 cheaper for twice as much storage. The 4TB is 250 dollary doos.

 

[theouto]

For some perspective, the Lexar NM790 that scores 1% slower is $50 cheaper for twice as much storage. The 4TB is 250 dollary doos.

And as a bonus, (from a quick search, maybe I found some wrong images) it doesn't take up half your pc like this drive does! What was so nice about m.2s was that the space requirement was completely negligible, was

 

[bug]

For some perspective, the Lexar NM790 that scores 1% slower is $50 cheaper for twice as much storage. The 4TB is 250 dollary doos.

Lexar uses Chinese NAND which is cheaper anyway. But the 4GB SSD I got (Silicon Power, iirc) uses Micron NAND and costs about the same.

 

[Onasi]

Consumers rejected U.2 drives. Both intel and samsung tried but they were turned down. Gaming boards used to sell with U.2 ports and gamers ran screaming away from them because it wasn't as easy to make "muh g4m1ng PC" look cool to post pictures of with windowed cases.

PC g4m1ng stuck again and fucked it all up. As is the normal.

I don’t think gamers building showpiece PCs had anything to do with U.2 being deemed unviable for consumer market. The desktop enthusiast crowd is a minority, as Chrispy mentioned. The real issue was that M.2 was perfect for laptops where the actual biggest piece of the pie is.

 

[micropage7]

actually what catch my eyes is the cooler

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

I don’t think gamers building showpiece PCs had anything to do with U.2 being deemed unviable for consumer market. The desktop enthusiast crowd is a minority, as Chrispy mentioned. The real issue was that M.2 was perfect for laptops where the actual biggest piece of the pie is.

When NVME first hit intel and Samsung were out of the gate with U.2 and PCI-E options that slaughtered the M.2 form factor drives with none of the heat related issues and g4m1ng boards shipped with U.2 connectors on them back in ye old z170 and x99 days. Guess what! The mUh g4m1ng PC sell your GPUs at a loss and go bankrupt because mUh g4m1ng PC crowd did not buy them. Instead they all bought M.2 drives even on boards with U.2 connectors stomped their footsies about the price of GPUs and slapped RGB all over the place and that was that!

Companies were smart enough to realize they were tossing pearls before swine (and that's unfair to pigs!) and simply focused on the workstation/server market for AICs and U.2 devices. U.2 connectors vanished from gaming boards quickly and instead even more RGB lights were slapped all over them along with silly heatsinks for M.2 drives because that is what mUh g4m1ng PC market actually wanted and was purchasing.

It was entirely a self own on the part of PC g4m3rZ. They still sell U.2 and AICs that range from professional class devices to the exact same thing as the M.2 drive just with vastly better cooling potential. They just don't bother marketing it to PC g4m3rZ unless they decide to slap a shit load of RGB on it because it turns out that's what the PC g4m1ng market actually cared about! There's nothing stopping you from getting an M.2 to U.2 device that plugs straight into the M.2 slot and runs the cables out of it you need. People use these all the time. But it doesn't look sexy in a case with a glass window and RGB vomit on constantly while it sits on your desk and looks silly when you post pictures of it on the internet so PC g4m3rZ don't go this route.

FWIW my old x99 workstation still has 2x intel 750p U.2 devices in it running RAID0 and it never had a single problem. And this was from back in the day when even gaming boards shipped with U.2 connectors as bog standard but PC g4m3rZ kept opting for M.2 devices that throttled to hell and back and had heat issues despite having the U.2 connectors all while they slapped RGB onto everything and then cried about the price of nvidia GPUs and nothing has changed. Companies got the message loud and clear about what gamers actually cared about it and laughed all the way to the bank!