With the Spatium M480 Play, MSI is going specifically after the large PlayStation gamer crowd. Sony has opened the internal storage of their PS5 console up for upgrades, allowing standard M.2 NVMe drives to be installed. MSI seized this opportunity and created a drive that is optimized for the requirements of the PS5, but such a drive will of course work really well in a PC, too.

Internally, MSI is using the same Phison E18 controller as on the plain M480, but with newer firmware, and of course upgraded NAND flash, which is now Micron 176-layer instead of the slower 96-layer NAND on the original M480. A DRAM cache for the mapping tables of the SSD is included, too; 2 GB of fast DDR4-2666 from Hynix are used.

Overall synthetic performance results of the MSI Spatium M480 are very good, near the top of our scoreboards, which is expected of any drive using the E18 controller. Phison made sure a lot of optimization went into getting these synthetic scores high enough, which is why our real-life testing is so important—it runs actual applications, something that's much harder to optimize for. Our real-life testing is also performed with 80% of the drive filled, which is a more realistic scenario and limits the drive in the way it uses its pseudo-SLC cache.

The real-life test results are excellent, 2% faster than the M480, which means the M480 Play is able to match the WD Black SN850 and Kingston KC3000—the fastest drives on the market. Samsung's highly popular 980 Pro is beat by 1%, just like the ADATA Atom 50 and Corsair MP600 Pro. Compared to PCIe 3.0 drives, the performance difference is between 5% and 15%, and aging SATA drives are at least 25% slower. Considering the components again (Phison E18 and B47R 176-layer from Micron), it becomes clear that the M480 Play is essentially the same drive as the Corsair MP600 LPX and Kingston KC3000. Of course, there will be minor tweaks in the way these vendors configured their drives, but overall performance will be nearly identical.

Sony's PS5 compatibility requirements mandate that the drive has a heatsink. MSI has paired a very decent thermal solution with the M480 Play, and it's standard-sized, so it will work perfectly even when the drive is installed in a PC. I also like the visual design of the heatsink; it looks clean yet comes with a stylish mix of colors, especially the coarse surface structure with its matte reflections improves the look and feel of the product. In our thermal stress test, we couldn't get the drive to thermally throttle at all, mostly thanks to Phison's energy-efficient controller design, but the heatsink works well, too. With 77°C measured temperature, the drive doesn't really get that warm—we're often seeing over 100°C on high-end M.2 NVMe drives in that test. That's great news for the PS5 as it means you don't have to worry about thermal throttling. Thermals are actually not a big deal on the PS5 due to the sporadic activity and adequate passive airflow design, but it never hurts to have better cooling.

Priced at $330 for the tested 2 TB version, the MSI Spatium M480 Play is not cheap, though. It seems MSI is following the pricing of the most expensive PCIe 4.0 M.2 2 TB drives on the market, like the Kingston KC3000 ($340). I'd prefer the MSI Play over the KC3000 for the small savings and because it has an excellent heatsink included. The Corsair MP600 LPX is $360, basically the same as the M480 Play—pick the more affordable one. Strong competition comes from the Samsung 980 Pro, which currently sells for $250, which is an excellent deal. The WD Black SN850 is also discounted to $260 right now, another top choice. Given these two offerings, the M480 Play does seem expensive, but pricing varies almost daily, and by geographical region, too. You might also want to consider PCIe 3.0 SSDs for gaming and applications on the PC or PS5—the real-life differences are minimal, and the money saved can be used for something else.