The MSI Spatium M480 Pro is the company's third iteration on a Phison E18-based high-performance SSD—which are all grouped under the "Spatium M480" model line. The "Pro" version in this review is based on Micron's 176-layer 3D TLC NAND, paired with 2 GB of Hynix DRAM cache and Phison's fastest Gen 4 controller. Unlike the original MSI M480 and M480 Play, there is no heatsink included, which is a reasonable cost-optimization, especially in less demanding scenarios.

Overall synthetic performance results of the MSI Spatium M480 Pro 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.

Real-life test results are excellent, the M480 Pro is one of the fastest SSD's we ever tested. It roughly matches the WD Black SN850, Solidigm P44 Pro and Kingston KC3000 (which uses the same components as the M480 Pro). The famous Samsung 980 Pro is 3% slower on average, the original MSI Spatium M480 is 2% slower. Corsair's MP700, the company's flagship PCI-Express 5.0 drive is only 2% faster. Compared to entry-level M.2 NVMe drives, the performance uplift is around 20%, which makes the M480 Pro 40% faster than aging SATA drives. I found it surprising that the M480 Pro ends up a little bit behind the Kingston KC3000, it seems the difference is that the Kingston drive runs its flash at 1600 MT/s, while MSI has opted for 1200 MT/s.

Just like all other modern TLC drives, the M480 Pro comes with an SLC cache that absorbs incoming writes at high speed, but uses three times the storage to do so. Our testing reveals that the SLC cache is sized at 192 GB, which matches the other M480 models. While that size is fine, I still feel like a larger allocation could help. We were able to fill the whole 2 TB capacity at 2.5 GB/s, which is a fantastic result and better than nearly all drives on the market. If you plan on writing a ton of data in short bursts, this (and other Phison E18+176L drives) is what you want.

MSI does not include a heatsink with the M480 Pro, and that's fine for all lighter usage models. In our worst-case thermal stress test we saw throttling very quickly, after just 40 seconds of writes at full speed. While that sounds scary, it is not—in that timeframe, the drive wrote over 150 GB (!) of data. Besides restoring a backup, I can't think of any scenario where I'd have to write that much data in such a short time. You also have to consider that you need a source first that can provide data at a rate of 4+ GB/s consistently. Downloading games on Steam is much slower, limited by the bandwidth of your internet connection. Still, the original MSI M480 and the "Play" both came with a fantastic heatsink that ensured there's no thermal throttling, no matter what you throw at the drive. If you plan on putting the SSD under your motherboard's M.2 heatsink, then the "Pro" is actually a preferable choice, because you won't have to remove the heatsink before installation.

According to MSI, the M480 Pro will sell for $130, which seems a bit on the high side, especially considering that you can get the original M480 with a heatsink for $120 right now. There's also lots of other good options near that price point, like the WD Black SN850X for $120, the Addlink S95 for $105, the Solidigm P44 Pro for $110 and of course the Samsung 980 Pro for $120. An interesting choice is the WD Black SN770, which lacks DRAM, but offers excellent performance at a highly competitive $100 price point. In order to have a clear winner on their hands, MSI must lower the price of the M480 Pro just a little bit, $110 and below would make the drive a tempting choice in this segment, which right now seems to be driven by aggressive pricing from all the major players.