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 M480 Play connects to the host system using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


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


The Spatium M480 Play comes with the heatsink preinstalled. It's a sleek metal clamshell design that fits the PS5 case perfectly. The mounting mechanism uses four screws and sticky thermal paste.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The eight flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


Two Hynix DDR4-2666 chips provide a total of 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.