Introduction

MSI is a world-leading gaming hardware manufacturer 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 entered the SSD market a few years ago.


I've reviewed several PCIe Gen 5 SSDs in the last months, they are all based on the Phison E26 controller, which is the only design in mass production at this time. The MSI Spatium M580 uses the E26, too, but is a drive of the newest generation, with support for transfer speeds of up to 14 GB/s, which is a 2 GB/s increase over the 12 GB/s designs and 4 GB/s faster than the first 10 GB/s models. This is possible thanks to Micron 232-layer NAND flash, which ticks at 2400 MT/s. On the first Gen 5 SSDs, Micron 1600 MT/s flash was used. While some vendors are bundling active-cooled thermal solutions with their Gen 5 SSDs, MSI is including a huge heatsink—that is passively cooled. This avoids several shortcomings of fan-cooled SSDs, such as additional fan noise and the wiring mess from the fan power cable. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.

Exact pricing for the MSI Spatium M580 isn't available yet, but MSI confirmed that it will be very similar to competing 14 GB/s drives. This means that you should expect to pay around $180 for 1 TB, $320 for 2 TB and $515 for 4 TB. Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW, 1400 TBW and 3000 TBW, respectively. MSI includes a five-year warranty with the M580 SSD.