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 entered the SSD market last year.



Today's review covers the MSI Spatium M480 Pro 2 TB. The "Pro" is the third MSI Spatium M480 variant that has been released over the years. The original "M480" was based on Phison's E18 controller paired with 96-layer 3D TLC from Micron. The M480 "Play" improved on that by switching to newer 176-layer 3D TLC and also brought PS5 compatibility thanks to a slightly reworked heatsink design. The M480 "Pro" in this review comes without heatsink, but retains the 176-layer NAND flash of the "Play" version. You also get Phison's newest firmware, which they claim is optimized for DirectStorage—something that nobody can test, because there's just one game with DirectStorage (Forspoken), and it has a subpar DirectStorage implementation. As expected for a high-end Phison E18 design, a DRAM cache is included with the SSD.

MSI Spatium M480 Pro is available in capacities of 1 TB (unknown), 2 TB ($130) and 4 TB (unknown). Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW, 1400 TBW and 3000 TBW, respectively. MSI includes a five-year warranty with the M480 Pro.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and eight flash chips, two DRAM cache chips are installed, too.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


Two Hynix DDR4-2666 chips provide a total of 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• M.2 drives are tested with a fan blowing on them; that is, except for the results investigating uncooled behavior on the thermal testing page.

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 600 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 80% of their capacity
• Partitions are properly aligned.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.