Introduction

MSI is a world-leading hardware manufacturer that is mostly famous for their graphics cards, motherboards, and laptops. In addition to these, MSI also offers monitors, peripherals, cases, and power supplies. With such a complete lineup, it's not surprising that MSI is entering the SSD market now.



The Spatium M.2 SSD Series by MSI was announced a few weeks ago. Today, we're proud to be among the first sites to get you a review of these new solid-state drives.

With the Spatium lineup, MSI focuses on PCI-Express 4.0. Two drives are available at this time, the Spatium M480 (this review) and the more affordable Spatium M470 (our review, also posted today). A third, value-ended drive based on PCIe Gen 3 will be added in the coming weeks.

The Spatium M480 is based on the Phison E18 controller, the fastest currently available controller from Phison. MSI has paired it with 96-layer TLC NAND flash from Micron. Going by the number "4" in "M470," you probably already guessed right that the SSD uses the PCI-Express 4.0 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth over PCI-Express Gen 3. Two DDR4-2666 DRAM chips provide 2 GB of memory for the mapping tables of the SSD. Exactly the same hardware configuration is used by the Corsair MP600 Pro and Addlink S95.

The MSI Spatium M480 comes in capacities of 500 GB (pricing unknown), 1 TB (pricing unknown), and 2 TB ($440). Endurance for these models is set to 350 TBW, 700 TBW, and 1400 TBW respectively. MSI includes a five-year warranty with the MSI Spatium M480 SSD.

A striking feature with the M480 is its massive heatsink that lets you do away with the one your motherboard comes with, as this one has been tested for optimal performance with the drive. In this review, we put the drive through its paces.