The MSI Spatium M450 is the first SSD based on the Phison E19 controller that we're testing. Phison designed the E19 to be able to offer a cost-efficient 4-channel controller design that uses the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface. PCI-Express 4.0 is all the hype these days and people are actively hunting for the drives at bargain prices—this is the niche Phison wants to fill. They still offer their high-end E18 controller, which is used on some of the fastest drives available on the market. In terms of NAND flash, there's no surprises: MSI is using Micron's latest and greatest B47R 176-layer TLC flash. Since the M450 is a cost-efficient design, it makes sense that there is no included DRAM cache chip, which saves a few dollars. On an SSD, the DRAM cache is used to buffer the mapping tables of the SSD, which keep track of where a certain piece of data is located. Basically, it translates between linear disk addresses as seen by the operating system and the actual location of the data—which NAND flash chip at which address in that chip.

Synthetic performance numbers of the Spatium M450 are good, especially 4K random is mighty impressive. In 4K random read, the M450 is actually the fastest drive we ever tested. In 4K random write, it's the third-fastest drive in our test group. For a DRAM-less design, such a high 4K Random score is quite an achievement as that's usually where you'll see the weakness of a DRAM-less design. We investigated this some more and found that the new Phison controller has good DRAM-less performance, similar to the E15. At those tasks, it's still a bit slower than the controllers on the WD Blue NVMe SN570 and Samsung 980, which make their drives run almost like they had a physical DRAM cache chip. Sequential IO is decent, but held back by this being a 4-channel design, which simply can't move as much data around as the higher-performance 8-channels models. Overall, synthetic numbers are good and Phison clearly optimized their controller for this test scenario most reviewers focus on.

Our focus is on real-life testing, running actual applications with the drive at 80% full—a much more realistic scenario. Here, the MSI Spatium M450 reaches performance slightly below PCIe Gen 3 high-end drives. For example, the Samsung 970 EVO and Kingston A2000 are 3% slower, HP EX950 2% faster, ADATA SX8200 Pro 4% ahead, and Hynix Gold P31, the fastest PCIe 3.0 drive, 5% quicker. This makes the M450 roughly 10% faster than value PCIe 3.0 drives, like the ADATA Swordfish, Sabrent Rocket Q, and Kingston NV1, which is even 17% behind. Eight channel Gen 4 drives are 5-9% faster, not a lot, but it comes down to your workload and pricing, of course.

Sustained write performance of the Spatium M450 is good, filling the whole capacity completed at 1.1 GB/s. With 90 GB, the SLC cache is reasonably sized. I still would have wished for something a little bit bigger, like 150 GB, to soak up the biggest write bursts. Unless you run multiple M.2 NVMe drives, you're unlikely to ever fill up the SLC cache, though. Most consumer workloads are bursty, there's pauses between disk activity, which gives the SLC cache time to free up capacity quickly.

MSI doesn't include a heatsink with the Spatium M450, yet thermals were still very impressive. Thanks to a highly energy-efficient controller design paired with TSMC's 28 nanometer production process, there is no thermal throttling, not even in our worst-case thermal stress test, which hammers the drive with incoming writes non-stop. This is good news for users of mini PCs or laptops with limited cooling capability—no heatsink required.

According to MSI, the Spatium M450 will retail for $115. This is a reasonable price point, but not aggressive enough for the drive to make a big splash, but it's not overpriced either. Given the performance numbers we're seeing, which are slightly below high-end PCI-Express 3.0 SSDs, I would in no way be willing to pay $120 or more for the 1 TB version of the M450 in today's market. There's the spectre of higher pricing due to an incident at a NAND flash factory, so prices can change quickly, but their relative differences should still be fairly constant. I'm sure "PCI-Express 4.0" will lure in many buyers, but the added performance is not there. No doubt, the M450 is faster than most PCIe 3.0 4-channel designs, but the gains aren't big enough to defeat 8-channel Gen 3 drives, and certainly not 8-channel Gen 4 drives. The strongest competitors for the MSI Spatium M450 are WD's fantastic WD Blue SN570, which is a little bit faster and extremely affordable at $90, and ADATA XPG Atom 50 for $120, which offers much better performance, but is only available in the US. If you're in Europe, the Kioxia Exceria SSD could be an alternative; it comes with DRAM cache, four channels, and is super affordable at $85.