Introduction

MSI is a world-leading gaming 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 has entered the SSD market last year.



We reviewed the original MSI Spatium M480 in August last year, and it left an excellent impression. Today, we have for review the MSI Spatium M480 Play, which is a slightly upgraded design featuring the same Phison E18 controller, PCI-Express 4.0 support, and DRAM cache. What's changed is that the NAND flash chips are now Micron's newest 176-layer 3D TLC; the original M480 used 96-layer Micron. The new flash chips offer slightly better performance overall and significantly improved write speeds. In order to improve compatibility with the Sony PlayStation 5, MSI improved their heatsink, which is now a bit more compact, yet still packs a punch to ensure there is no overheating.

The MSI Spatium M480 Play comes in capacities of 500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB. At this time, only the price for the 2 TB version in this review is known: $330. MSI includes a five-year warranty with the M480 Play.