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.

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


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


MSI's cooler is a big and impressive design that comes with three heatpipes.


After taking the unit apart, you can see how they integrated the heatpipes in the cooler. Four screws on the sides ensure that contact is always strong, even after prolonged use.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5026-E26 is Phison's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller. It is the company's current flagship with support for eight flash channels and NVMe 2.0, using an Arm Cortex design. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


Two Hynix DDR4-4266 chips provide a total of 8 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.