MSI Spatium M480 2 TB

[W1zzard]

The MSI Spatium M480 is a flagship SSD based on the Phison E18 controller, featuring support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface. Inside the box, you'll find a heatsink that looks fantastic and very sleek to provide cooling for this 7 GB/s monster.

Show full review

 

[GabrielLP14]

Awesome review, just a think, this Phison E18 controller has 8 Channels and each individual channels supports up to 4 Chips enables per channel, so it can interleave up to 4 dies per channel, so is it really correct to say that it supports 32 "Chips"? the correct would be 32 dies that would interleave right? OR am i confusing it?

 

[W1zzard]

Awesome review, just a think, this Phison E18 controller has 8 Channels and each individual channels supports up to 4 Chips enables per channel, so it can interleave up to 4 dies per channel, so is it really correct to say that it supports 32 "Chips"? the correct would be 32 dies that would interleave right? OR am i confusing it?

You are absolutely right of course, I'll reword to "dies"

 

[Mac the Geek]

If I was still in the market for a 2TB Gen4 drive, this one would definitely be added to the list.

But as with most things, the correct approach is "wishlist the ones that fit your requirements, and then wait for a sale". Amazon had the 980 Pro 2TB at $314 during their Prime Day sale in June, which is the lowest price I've yet seen on a 2TB drive with the full 7000Mb/s read speed. I had three models (the 980 Pro, the SN850, and the Aorus 7000s) on wishlists at Amazon, Newegg, and any other place I could find them... then checked the wishlists daily for sales. If you can afford to wait... add this one to the mix, and wait for Black Friday.

 

[Minus Infinity]

It's actually tragic how little difference these so-called superfast drives make to a normal person's everyday experience. Just look at the real world graphs and other than the few usual garbage drives BX500, 870QVO, for the most part it makes no difference what you use. Talk of PCIe 5 SSD's is ludicrous. More heat, more expense and only those that deal with huge file transfer regularly will benefit. My 970 EVO Plus still has higher sustained whole drive performance than many of the "much faster" PCIe 4 drives.

Just buy a good quality NVME drive for the best price rather than worrying about bleeding edge that delivers next to no benefit. I'd much rather a 4TB PCIe 3 than a 2TB PCIe 4 SSD any day.

 

[Caring1]

With the heatsink attached, would this drive be suitable for the Sony PS5?

"The total height of the M.2 SSD and its cooling structure (such as a heatsink) – whether built-in or separate – must be less than 11.25mm (0.442in)."

How to add an M.2 SSD to a PS5 console

Find out which M.2 SSDs can be used to expand your PlayStation®5 console storage space, and how to insert an M.2 SSD into the expansion slot.

www.playstation.com

 

[Dragokar]

It's actually tragic how little difference these so-called superfast drives make to a normal person's everyday experience. Just look at the real world graphs and other than the few usual garbage drives BX500, 870QVO, for the most part it makes no difference what you use. Talk of PCIe 5 SSD's is ludicrous. More heat, more expense and only those that deal with huge file transfer regularly will benefit. My 970 EVO Plus still has higher sustained whole drive performance than many of the "much faster" PCIe 4 drives.

Just buy a good quality NVME drive for the best price rather than worrying about bleeding edge that delivers next to no benefit. I'd much rather a 4TB PCIe 3 than a 2TB PCIe 4 SSD any day.

There is also the controller and NAND shuffle/roulette, and I bet MSI will not be any different to A-Data, PNY, Patriot and so on.....

 

[W1zzard]

With the heatsink attached, would this drive be suitable for the Sony PS5?

"The total height of the M.2 SSD and its cooling structure (such as a heatsink) – whether built-in or separate – must be less than 11.25mm (0.442in)."

How to add an M.2 SSD to a PS5 console

Find out which M.2 SSDs can be used to expand your PlayStation®5 console storage space, and how to insert an M.2 SSD into the expansion slot.

www.playstation.com

Just measured, height with heatsink installed is 20 mm. This PS5 compatibility thing will lead to all of us getting shitty heatsinks with minimal cooling capacity, just so the drives can fit PS5

 

[Space Lynx]

@W1zzard you have endurance as 1400 TBW on the first page of the review should be 3200 I think?

 

[W1zzard]

@W1zzard you have endurance as 1400 TBW on the first page of the review should be 3200 I think?

https://storage-asset.msi.com/datasheet/storage/global/SPATIUM-M480-PCIe-4.0-NVMe-M.2.pdf

 

[Space Lynx]

https://storage-asset.msi.com/datasheet/storage/global/SPATIUM-M480-PCIe-4.0-NVMe-M.2.pdf

your 1tb review of this same drive shows 1600 TBW on the first page thats why I was wondering, one of them is off that's all I know

edit: nm I just noticed they are different model numbers.. ugh... I really wish companies would start naming better... like Kingston Ghost Tree

 

[W1zzard]

One is Toshiba NAND, the other Micron.

Edit: one is M470 other is M480, completely different drives

 

[BSim500]

It's actually tragic how little difference these so-called superfast drives make to a normal person's everyday experience. Just look at the real world graphs and other than the few usual garbage drives BX500, 870QVO, for the most part it makes no difference what you use. Talk of PCIe 5 SSD's is ludicrous. More heat, more expense and only those that deal with huge file transfer regularly will benefit. My 970 EVO Plus still has higher sustained whole drive performance than many of the "much faster" PCIe 4 drives.

Beyond a certain level of performance, much of the mindless number chasing rat-race is nearly all FOMO marketing ("Fear Of Missing Out"). I'm still rocking my 2TB MX500 (SATA) bought for £153 and quite honestly I can see me keeping it another 3-5 years or even until it dies as that's how long I believe it will take for SSD manufacturers to get over the absurd +100-160% price premiums I'm seeing on £300-£400 "must have" NVMe 4.0 drives for same 2TB capacity (SN850, MP600, Rocket 4 Plus, 980 PRO, etc). As for benchmarks, I don't even look at CrystalDiskMark, etc, synthetics anymore. I jump straight to the real-world stuff (OS boot time, game load times, etc) and base everything solely off that. I sure don't see paying double the money for +10% difference (eg, 13.5 vs 15s game load times) as money well spent.

 

[GabrielLP14]

There is also the controller and NAND shuffle/roulette, and I bet MSI will not be any different to A-Data, PNY, Patriot and so on.....

Probably yes, they're using Fortis Flash B27B which is a good Nand, how ever they could've choose those new Micron's 176-L or even other manufacturer from which they could have better performance per Die and even higher sustained writtes speeds after the pSLC Write Caching, which is also Full Dynamic, compared to Samsung's Turbo Write or Western Digital nCache 4.0 found in these new SN850 which has a Hybrid Buffer (Static + Dynamic)

 

[fb020997]

The biggest performance increases will be thanks to improved NANDs (like the 176l previewed) and controllers, not with faster PCIe interface speeds IMHO. BTW, currently there are nearly zero practical differences between a 3.0 and 4.0 NVMe drive, so for 99.5% of people a 4.0 is wasted money. And I say that as a 4.0 user (since I sold cpu+mobo+ram+nvme to a customer for a gooooood price I bought everything new, and I didn’t mind the ~50€ difference on ~700€ of hardware).

 

[GabrielLP14]

The biggest performance increases will be thanks to improved NANDs (like the 176l previewed) and controllers, not with faster PCIe interface speeds IMHO. BTW, currently there are nearly zero practical differences between a 3.0 and 4.0 NVMe drive, so for 99.5% of people a 4.0 is wasted money. And I say that as a 4.0 user (since I sold cpu+mobo+ram+nvme to a customer for a gooooood price I bought everything new, and I didn’t mind the ~50€ difference on ~700€ of hardware).

Precisely correct.
Maybe in the future Gen 4 drives will be more reasonable, being cheaper and having better cost per GB.
Not only Controller + Nand are import, the Firmware is also very important. How the manufacturer developed it, and if it can deliver as high a performance as the components can deliver.

 

[fb020997]

Precisely correct.
Maybe in the future Gen 4 drives will be more reasonable, being cheaper and having better cost per GB.
Not only Controller + Nand are import, the Firmware is also very important. How the manufacturer developed it, and if it can deliver as high a performance as the components can deliver.

Damn right that the firmware is very important. I remember that there was a big uplift in real world performance from the HP EX950 1TB to 2TB because on the latter there was a new firmware (that the reviewer had to request IIRC), or same thing with a (maybe) Kingston NVMe.
I really hope that brands won’t pull a Western Digital with the Black and Black 2018 NVMe and sell the same exact SSD with a different, faster firmware for more money (and not upgrading the “previous model”s firmware)…

 

[GabrielLP14]

Damn right that the firmware is very important. I remember that there was a big uplift in real world performance from the HP EX950 1TB to 2TB because on the latter there was a new firmware (that the reviewer had to request IIRC), or same thing with a (maybe) Kingston NVMe.
I really hope that brands won’t pull a Western Digital with the Black and Black 2018 NVMe and sell the same exact SSD with a different, faster firmware for more money (and not upgrading the “previous model”s firmware)…

Oh yeah i remember that too
Recently there was a "scandal" of using SN850 through AMD's X570 PCH as well, it was an unreliable firmware