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

While the M470 is based on the Phison E16, the M480 is based on the Phison E18 controller, which is among the fastest available and has the M480 beat out solid-state drives with controllers from Western Digital and Samsung. Phison's PS5018-E18 controller is a high-end eight-channel model based on a multi-core ARM design that is fabricated at TSMC using 12 nanometer technology. Other important components of the drive are 96-layer 3D TLC flash from Micron and 2 GB of fast DDR4-2666 DRAM cache, which helps achieve the best performance during random write activity. The unique selling point of the drive is support for the PCI-Express 4.0 interface, which has become mainstream thanks to AMD's Ryzen processors. Intel has added support for PCIe 4.0 with Rocket Lake CPUs, which should help the push for PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Physically, the MSI Spatium M480 seems identical to the Phison E18 reference design, which also makes it identical to the Corsair MP600 Pro and Addlink S95.

We recently previewed the combination Phison E18 with Micron 176-layer TLC NAND flash, which achieves impressive performance, being faster than then Samsung 980 Pro and gaining a few additional percent over the 96-layer version. I wish MSI had used this flash for their new release to set themselves apart from Corsair MP600 Pro and Addlink S95.

Synthetic numbers of the Spatium M480 are extremely impressive. Random IO, mixed, read, and write are higher than any other drive we've ever tested with the exception of the Corsair MP600 Pro, which is essentially the same drive. Sequential numbers are among the best we've ever seen, too.

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 M480 can excel as well. It is always near the top of our charts and reaches performance that's pretty much identical to the fastest drives out there. The Samsung 980 Pro is only 1% faster, and the WD Black SN850 is 2% faster—nothing you'd ever notice subjectively. Compared to the best PCIe Gen 3 SSDs, the performance increase is 3–5%, and value-oriented Gen 3 SSDs are up to 15% slower on average. Some individual application scenarios will show bigger differences.

While the differences are certainly impressive, they are not "double," which is what the transition from PCIe Gen 3 to Gen 4 could suggest to the uneducated reader. The underlying reason is that almost no application is only limited by sequential transfer rates. Most workloads are a mixture of low queue depth random and sequential IO, with working sets as big as a few gigabytes.

Sequential write performance of the MSI Spatium M480 is very good; filling the whole drive completes at around 1.7 GB/s on average, with peaks starting out at over 5 GB/s. This is a really good result and faster than any other SSD but the Samsung 980 Pro and MLC-based 970 Pro. At 200 GB, the SLC cache is also sufficiently large to soak up nearly all bursts of write activity. Even when the SLC cache is exhausted will you get serious write rates: 1.8 GB/s and 1 GB/s. 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.

MSI includes a really nice heatsink with the Spatium M480. It not only cools well, it's also very sleek, definitely one of the best-looking heatsink designs. When operated without the heatsink and airflow and subjected to very heavy loads, the M480 will thermally throttle fairly quickly. Once we installed the heatsink, this wasn't a problem at all. For nearly all consumer workloads, thermals are not an issue, but it's great to see that MSI has the power users covered by including a heatsink in the box. I also like that the heatsink uses screws to maximize contact with the thermal pads. The drive's own thermal reporting is extremely optimistic; when 70°C were reported to the software, actual surface temperature was 110°C.

Priced at $440 for the tested 2 TB version, the MSI Spatium M480 is expensive. For that amount of money, you can almost get a 4 TB SSD, but it of course won't be as fast. Good 2 TB M.2 NVMe SSDs start at around $250, which makes the difference to $440 just to eke the last bits of performance out of your storage subsystem huge. Strong competition also comes from the Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB ($430), which is slightly faster than the MSI M480 and profits from the "Samsung" brand fame and trust. WD's SN850 Black is a little bit faster than the M480, too, but more expensive. The Corsair MP600 Pro ($460) is basically the same as the M480 and comes with a heatsink, too. The Addlink S95 is identical, lacks the heatsink, and costs $450. Overall, I have to congratulate MSI for entering the SSD market with a splash. All we need now is for pricing to come down just a little bit more.