MSI Spatium M480 Play 2TB, M.2 2280 / M-Key / PCIe 4.0 x4, Kühlkörper

Ohne Frage ist bereits der neue, flache Kühlkörper und damit die Möglichkeit die SPATIUM M480 Play auch in die Sony PS5 schieben zu können, für manche schon Grund genug für einen Kauf. Für alle anderen veredelt MSI die neue Variante mit schnellem 176-Layer-NAND, der auch ein Geschwindigkeit-Update bedeutet.

The MSI Spatium M480 Play isn’t a bad first look at MSI’s jump into SSDs. Like with the rest of their components, MSI has jumped right into the higher-end SSD market with gaming in mind and the Spatium M480 Play fits with that perfectly. I like the styling that they went with, the black and grey finish on the heatsink, and slipping in the MSI Gaming logo as well. The built-in heatsink has both its upsides and downsides. For cooling, it made a huge difference. I wasn’t able to heat it up at all really. It also is what gives the M480 its PS5 compatibility but if you are planning on using it for PC use it could also give issues with some higher-end motherboards which often have their own heatsink designs built-in. The drive itself was surprisingly hot and cold for its performance testing. In almost all of our tests, it topped the charts, especially with its nearly 7000 MB/s read and 6800+MB/s write performance. It was also great in our IOPS tests. But it struggled in some of our real-world tests with performance drop off part of the way into the tests and in AS SSD’s file transfer test as well. This doesn’t hurt its potential as a gaming drive though, but I wouldn’t really look to use it for storage that you would access a lot. Something else I should point out is that the Spatium M480 Play is just one of three different Spatium M480 designs. MSI has had a design with a larger heatsink out for PCs as well as one without a heatsink at all. So the Play model is focused more on PS5 use with the option to use on a PC as well. Its pricing is unknown right now as well, the two other M480 designs are available to buy but the Spatium M480 Play isn’t for sale yet so we don’t know if the pricing is going to be reasonable or not just yet. I would guess that it will fall in between the two other M480 models which for the 2TB model like tested today is $329.99 for the non-heatsink version and $359.99 for the large heatsink version. For comparison, the FURY Renegade that the Spatium M480 Play performed similarly to is $356 right now without a heatsink so it looks like MSI will be close to the mark assuming the Spatium M480 Play comes out in that range.

With the Spatium M480 Play, MSI is going specifically after the large PlayStation gamer crowd. Sony has opened the internal storage of their PS5 console up for upgrades, allowing standard M.2 NVMe drives to be installed. MSI seized this opportunity and created a drive that is optimized for the requirements of the PS5, but such a drive will of course work really well in a PC, too.

The Spatium M480 Play is a modified version of the original Spatium M480. It is an M.2 2280 NVMe SSD that utilizes Phison's E18 controller with newer firmware and 176-Layer TLC 3D NAND flash to support capacities of up to 4TB. The SSD is 80.4 x 24 x 10.7mm in size and features a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe interface for compatibility with both PS5 and PCs. There are four storage capacities available: 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. The first two drive models come with 512MB and 1GB of cache, respectively, while the bigger drives come with 2GB of cache. Realistically the biggest performance benefit is deriving from the new Phison firmware, but small file performance has greatly increased with the latest updates. We do believe you will not notice the real-world effect and difference between even a 3GB/sec and a 7GB/sec SSD anytime soon, but DirectStorage is getting supported, and that's where it's going to matter. If an application loads in a fraction of a second, it will be quicker in that fraction of a second. Other than that somewhat personal remark, all lights are green, TLC, high endurance and warranty. Please do seat the SSD under a mobo-supplied heatsink. It's running extremely hot without it, with a heatsink which prevents thermal throttling. Of course, to get the best out of it, you'll need a PCIe Gen 4 infrastructure, and at the time of writing, that means a compatible Ryzen processor on, say, a B550 or X570 chipset-based platform. In March 2021, Intel will start with PCIe gen 4.0 support as well. The Spatium M480 PLAY has been sufficiently buffered by a pseudo-SLC write cache and 1 GB of DRAM buffer for the 1TB model and 2GB for the 2+ TB models. The unit makes you shiver in performance given the right conditions, and for the rest of them, you are down to high-end class NVMe performance on some workloads. NVMe protocol v1.4; this SSD is among the first to utilize the new NVMe 1.4 protocol. You do not need to install any new drivers; just make sure your OS is updated. Then install and format the SSD, and you're ready to go full throttle. We'll say it again: MSI warrants the storage unit for five years / or the claimed TBW value. MSI's SSD enthusiast product line is attractive at 18/19 cents per GB (street pricing). Whether or not you will ever require this degree of performance or notice a real-life difference between gen 3.0 and gen 4.0 devices remains debatable. The good news is that as performance improves, things will accelerate in both the low-end and mainstream markets. Examine this: 3 GB/sec NVMe SSDs are rapidly becoming the industry standard and are currently widely available; consider this for a second. If you want it, this is an attractive offer backed by a reputable name; with excellent performance, warranty, and quality with a proper cooler as well.