Introduction

MSI is a world-leading gaming hardware manufacturer that is mostly 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 has entered the SSD market last year.



MSI is the youngest player in the SSD business but they are expanding their product offerings aggressively. Today, we have for review the MSI Spatium M450, which is built around Phison's new E19 series controller. The Phison E19 is based on the E13, but with an upgraded PCI-Express 4.0 interface for higher sequential transfer speeds and better marketing value. It's still a cost-effective design with only four flash channels that makes do without DRAM. As flash chips, Micron's newest 176-layer 3D TLC NAND are used—we've seen these in many recent reviews before.

The MSI Spatium M450 comes in capacities of 250 GB, 500 GB, and 1 TB. The 1 TB variant is expected to cost $115. Endurance for these models is set to 150 TBW, 300 TBW, and 600 TBW respectively. MSI provides a five-year warranty for the M450 SSD.

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 Spatium M450 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and two flash chips. A DRAM cache chip is not available.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison E19T is a brand-new controller that supports TLC NAND without DRAM cache for cost optimizations. The bus interface is PCI-Express 4.0 x4 and supports NVMe 1.4. The chip is fabricated on a 28 nanometer process by TSMC Taiwan. It's a 4-channel design with just one processor core (Arm Cortex R5)


The two flash chips are 176-layer 3D TLC NAND made by Micron.

Test Setup