With the Spatium M580, MSI is releasing a 14 GB/s PCIe Gen 5 SSD, which offers incredible performance right up to the limit of the new Gen 5 interface. These speeds are possible only thanks to Micron 232-layer NAND chips running at 2400 MT/s. The 10 GB/s and 12 GB/s Gen 5 SSDs use the same NAND, but at lower speeds of 1600 MT/s and 2000 MT/s. What I really like is that MSI opted for a completely passively cooled solution, which eliminates the need for an external, bulky, fan power cable, and ensures there is no fan noise coming from the SSD. At this time the only widely available PCIe Gen 5 controller for consumers is the Phison E26, which is used on the M580, too.

Synthetic performance results of the M580 are impressive, but we noticed a small performance regression when compared to the Corsair MP700 Pro. Sequential reads are a bit lower in our testing, yet CrystalDiskMark shows the expected numbers. We'll investigate and update this review accordingly. We can confirm that MSI's "up to 14 GB/s" claim is accurate (for sequential writes at QD2 and higher). Marketing materials for Gen 5 all focus on blazing fast sequential transfers. The reason is that random IO performance is virtually identical to the results of PCIe Gen 4 drives, like the Phison E18-based Kingston KC3000.

Phison has a long history of optimizing their controllers for typical synthetic reviewer workloads on an empty drive. That's why it's important to also include real-life testing. We're even running those tests with the drives filled to 80% capacity, not empty. This approach puts additional pressure on the various algorithms and the SLC cache, just like in real-life. In this testing the M580 does excellently and comes out as the fastest SSD we've ever tested. Compared to the Corsair MP700 Pro (which uses the same hardware as the MSI M570), the performance uplift is around 1%, which is expected, because very few real-life workloads scale with such high sequential transfer rates. Compared to Gen 4 SSDs, the performance uplift is around 5-10%, which is a repeat of what we've seen from the first Gen 4 drives, when compared to Gen 3 SSDs.

MSI's drive comes with an SLC cache size of 30% or 400 GB, which is enough to soak up all bursts of write activity, and it has the benefit that sustained rates are much better. First-gen PCIe 5.0 SSDs had a bigger SLC cache of 600 GB, but got penalized when that cache was full, so they filled their whole capacity at an average of 1.5 GB/s, whereas MSI's new SSD more than doubles that to 3.3 GB/s—very impressive.

Our power consumption testing confirms that the MSI Spatium really uses a lot of power. We've measured up to 11 W, which is basically 50% more than what we've seen on Phison's E18 Gen 4 controller. Hitting 11 W is quite rare though, you should rather plan with 5-6 W during typical loads, which is still a lot. Of course, you're getting higher performance at the same time, but our numbers show that even when running at only 1 or 2 GB/s, the power consumption is still high. It seems that once the controller goes out of idle, it will always use 4 W at least, no matter how little actual work it does (same as earlier Phison E26 models that we've tested). Read operation energy efficiency appears lower, because in our testing, the sequential reads are limited to 6 GB/s (same as in the synthetic read workload).

Gen 5 SSDs need serious cooling, which is why MSI is including a really serious heatsink with their SSD. I like this design, because it makes do without fans. On other Gen 5 drives, there's one or more tiny fans installed, which tend to be pretty loud. Since the Phison E26 controller has no support for temperature-based fan control, such a fan will always run at a constant speed, even when the drive is idle, and you have to grab power from a SATA or Molex power connector, which isn't the best solution if you want clean wiring in your rig. Thermal testing for our SSDs is conducted with a watercooling AIO on the processor, so there is very little airflow around the SSD socket area. MSI's thermal solution still did a great job and there was no thermal throttling, even when the drive was hammered with hundreds of GB of incoming data. Good job, MSI!

The big cooler does mean that the drive will obviously not fit in a notebook, and it won't fit in a PS5 either (which can't benefit from PCIe 5.0 anyway). I can also imagine that installation will be difficult in some SFF cases or with some motherboards that have big covers in the IO shield area. MSI recommends that 22 x 110 mm of installation space is available.

A final price point is not available yet for the MSI M580, but MSI confirmed to us that pricing "will be similar to competing models but may vary depending on the region." The Crucial T705 4 TB is such a competing model, and it currently sells for $515, which is the price point that I've used throughout this review—definitely not cheap. On the other hand you're getting the fastest possible drive and what's much more important in my opinion, a silent solution that works without additional fan noise. If you can live with "only" 12 GB/s, then you could choose to save $50, with only a minor loss in performance. Still, even $475 is A LOT of money for a 4 TB SSD, but the M.2 options are limited, especially in this capacity range. An interesting option is the WD Black SN850X 4 TB, which sells for $300, or the Lexar NM790 4 TB for $270, both of which are considerably less expensive, yet offer very similar performance using a PCIe Gen 4 interface.