MSI Spatium M480 Play 2TB
The Spatium M480 gets an upgrade.
PRICE $499 ONLINE
Lwww.msi.com
ast year, MSI entered the high performance SSD market with a bang. Its Spatium M480 drive performed well against its competition, blending form and function, although we felt its launch price was a little high to earn an unequivocal recommendation. Fast forward to 2022 and the Spatium M480 has received an upgrade from Micron 97-layer NAND to the latest and greatest 176-layer chips. It’s also built with PS5 compatibility in mind, making it a high performance and versatile option. But the competition hasn’t been sitting idle either.
In the latest APC, we reviewed the Silicon Power XS70. The MSI is all but identical as is the case with just about every high performance Phison-based drive. The M480 Play is a 2280 (80mm length) M.2 drive. It makes use of Micron 176-Layer TLC NAND and a Phison PS5018-E18 controller. It’s got 2GB of DDR4 DRAM onboard. It’s rated for 7,000/6,80MB/s sustained read and write speeds but that seems to be a bit conservative. The 2TB model is rated for 650K/700K read and write IOPS.
The 2TB model we’re testing comes with a 1400 TBW endurance rating and a five-year warranty. This fits in with most of the drives we’ve tested recently. You get Trim support and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring and in a welcome inclusion, AES256 hardware encryption support, which is something that many competitors lack.
MSI has tweaked the design of the heatsink to ensure PS5 compatibility. It’s subtle black design will blend in well with the company’s motherboards. The first Spatium M480 delivered a very cool 56c operating temperature while the Play delivered a peak reading of 61C. That’s a great result given the Play is the faster of the two.
When it comes to performance, we’d expect the M480 Play to perform much the same as other 176L Phison E18 equipped drives, and that turns out to be the case. Drives like the Spatium, Seagate FireCuda 530 and Kingston KC3000 are essentially all tied with one another. The Kingston just has the edge in read performance, while the MSI performs very well at write operations, much like the non-Play M480 does. In the end though, the differences are largely negligible, and that makes things like the design, software and most importantly, value for money the key purchase considerations.
The MSI Spatium M480 Play is priced at $499 for the 2TB model. At that price it’s main worry is the cheaper Samsung 980 Pro, which is still a very good drive. It just happens to be the same price as the Silicon Power drive. But which should you go for given that performance is largely identical? We’d say the inclusion of AES256 encryption and Actiphy backup and restore software means the MSI gets the nod.
The MSI is a fast and cool running drive. It looks great and it’s reasonably well priced at $499. We’re happy to recommend it, but whether you go for it or not depends on what happens to be well priced on the day you look to purchase it. You might want a PS5 drive, or a heatsink-less drive to install under a motherboard heatsink. SSDs are becoming commodity products. If you do choose the MSI, you won’t be disappointed.
CHRIS SZEWCZYK