Introduction

MSI is a world-leading hardware manufacturer that is mostly famous for their graphics cards, motherboard, 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 is entering the SSD market now.



The Spatium M.2 SSD Series by MSI was announced a few weeks ago, and today, we're proud to be among the first sites to get you a review of these new solid-state drives.

With the Spatium lineup, MSI focuses on PCI-Express 4.0. Two drives are available at this time, the Spatium M470 (this review) and Spatium M480 (our review, also posted today). These will be joined by a third PCIe Gen 3-based drive in the coming weeks.

The Spatium M470 is based on the Phison E16 controller paired with 96-layer TLC NAND flash from Toshiba. Going by the number "4" in "M470," you probably already guessed right that the SSD uses the PCI-Express 4.0 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth over PCI-Express Gen 3. Two DDR4-2400 DRAM chips provide 1 GB of memory for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The MSI Spatium M470 comes in capacities of 1 TB ($189) and 2 TB (pricing unknown). Endurance for these models is set to 1600 TBW and 3300 TBW respectively. MSI includes a five-year warranty with the MSI Spatium M470 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 MSI Spatium M470 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, four flash chips, and two DRAM chips.

Chip Component Analysis

The PS5016-E16 from Phison was one of the first controllers with support for PCI-Express 4.0. It is considered "first generation PCIe 4.0" because newer, more modern controllers offer significantly improved performance.


The four TLC NAND flash chips are made by Toshiba, built using 96 layers.


Two Hynix DDR4-2400 chips provide 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup