Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the MSI Spatium M470 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and two DRAM chips.

Chip Component Analysis

The PS5016-E16 from Phison was one of the first controllers with support for PCI-Express 4.0. It is considered "first generation PCIe 4.0" because newer, more modern controllers offer significantly improved performance.


The four TLC NAND flash chips are made by Toshiba, built using 96 layers.


Two Hynix DDR4-2400 chips provide 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.