MSI is entering the SSD market with two strong offerings. In this review, we took a close look at the Spatium M470. The higher-end Spatium M480 is reviewed here.

Under the hood, the Spatium M470 uses the combination of the Phison E16 controller and Toshiba 96-layer TLC NAND. While we have seen the E16 several times, it's the first time I reviewed one that's paired with Toshiba 96-layer flash. The new flash chips do provide a small performance advantage of around 2% over older flash, like on the Gigabyte PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Synthetic numbers of the M470 are very impressive, especially random writes are sky high. Sequential numbers are excellent, too, reaching well over 5 GB/s reads and 4 GB/s writes. Our real-life testing suite goes beyond synthetics and runs the actual applications at 80% disk full, which is a more realistic scenario than a completely empty drive running a synthetic test. Real-life benchmarks are much harder to optimize for, too. Here, the Spatium M470 also does very well and ends up as one of the fastest SSDs we ever tested. It trades blows with the Samsung 980 non-Pro, ADATA SX8200 Pro, and Hynix Gold P31—all these drives are within 1% of each other. The fastest drives in our test group are up to 4% faster, which is very hard to notice during actual usage. Compared to entry-level M.2 SSDs, the performance uplift is around 10%, more depending on the application, and SATA SSDs are up to 30% slower.

Sequential write performance of the Spatium M470 is very good since it fills the whole drive at 1 GB/s. The SLC cache is rather small, though. With just 28 GB, it is smaller than on all competing SSDs and could possibly become a bottleneck when doing very large writes. A size of around 100 GB would have been a better choice. Of course, momentarily stopping the write activity will have the SLC cache free up capacity immediately, so full write rates are available as soon as you give the drive a moment to settle down.

The Spatium M470 doesn't come with a heatsink, but it really doesn't need one. In our worst-case thermal stress test, we saw only minimal thermal throttling down to 3.2 GB/s from 4 GB/s. While the drive does get quite warm with around 105°C, this is well within the specifications of the controller and flash chips, and thermal protections are working perfectly fine as well. Just like on many other SSDs, thermal reporting is extremely optimistic, reporting 80°C when the actual temperature is around 100°C.

According to MSI, the 1 TB Spatium M470 will retail for $190, which is a lot of money. Going just by the performance offered, drives like the Hynix Gold P31 ($135), ADATA SX8200 Pro ($120), HP EX950 ($130), and Samsung 980 ($140) will give you a much better price/performance ratio. Of course, all these drives use the PCI-Express 3.0 interface, but on average, these are just as fast as the M470. If you run very specific workloads that consist of huge linear transfers, the PCIe 4.0 interface will be able to make a difference. In that case, the M470 competes with the WD Black SN850, Corsair MP600 Pro, and Samsung 980 Pro, which are all more expensive than the M470.