MSI SPATIUM M480 PRO 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Review – Maxing Out Phison’s E18

The MSI Spatium SSD lineup keeps on expanding with new and interesting variants. What started from PCIe Gen 3 products now has multiple Gen 4 and Gen 5 SSDs on shelves with more on their way. It's been almost two years since we tested the M480 and M470 Gen 4 SSDs which were some of the fastest consumer storage devices at the time but today, MSI is reaching new heights with its M480 Pro series.

Utilizing the same Phison E18 controller, MSI has managed to squeeze out even more juice from the M480 SSD and is now offering it under the Pro series. While the previous M480 peaked at 7000/6800 (Read/Write) transfer rates, the M480 Pro peaks out at 7400/7000 transfer speeds and a million IOPS.

Today, I will be testing the MSI Spatium M480 PRO 2 TB SSD. The drive features a Gen 4.0 protocol which means that it is future-proof and will offer some really fast speeds, targetting other high-end and mainstream solutions.

MSI SPATIUM M480 PRO is part of the MSI SPATIUM family. The MSI SPATIUM M480 PRO SSDs are based on the NVMe SSD form factor and feature TLC-based 3D NAND flash which offers larger capacities, better performance, and slightly lower power input. The M480 PRO SSDs are also based on the high-end Phison PS5018-E18 controller which is in use by some of the fastest Gen 4 drives at the moment.

In terms of performance, MSI's SPATIUM M480 PRO 2 TB has sequential read speeds of up to 7400 MB/s and write speeds of 7000 MB/s. The Random read speeds of these drives are up to 650K IOPS and the write is 1 MillionIOPS. The MSI SPATIUM M480 PRO 2 TB SSD has an idle power draw of 45mW and a maximum operating power of 10.5W. The endurance of the lineup is rated at 1400 TBW or 1,600,000 hours which should last a good amount of time with these drives. You are also looking at a 5-year limited warranty throughout the entire lineup.

The MSI Spatium M480 PRO 2 TB comes in a small package. The package is colored black and features large pictures of the SSD featured on it. The front also lists down some features such as capacities, maximum read speeds, PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 form factor, and the M480 packaging also mentions the bundled heat sink solution. The back of the package lists some specifications of the SSD and some performance figures which we will get to in a bit.

The M480 PRO package includes a warranty booklet and that's about it. I kind of miss the Lucky comic that was included in the previous drives *sad face*.

Out of the package, the MSI Spatium M480 Pro is in the standard M.2 2280 form factor and features a black PCB which is great since some mainstream drives come with blue-colored PCBs.

The front of the drives includes a specifications sticker and you can place the graphene pads on the exposed side of the PCB. The heatsink installation is pretty simple and requires you to slot the SSD into the bottom support which sets in place quite nicely.

The MSI SPATIUM M480 PRO 2 TB holds eight NAND Flash chips (96L) and a Phison E18 controller with 2 GB DDR4 memory while measuring 80x22x2.15mm (LxWxH).

The drive we received was a non-heatsink variant but you can also buy the heatsink variant by paying a little bit extra.

Our test platform for this review consisted of an Intel Core i9-13900K processor which ran at stock clocks on the MSI Z790 ACE motherboard. The platform was coupled with 32 GB of DDR5 memory from G.Skill (Trident Z5/ 16 GB x 2) and the MSI MEG Ai1300P PSU. For graphics, I used the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM X. This rounds up as a high-end platform for tests with modern-day SSDs. The MSI Z790 ACE specifically houses a single Gen 5.0 x4 NVMe slot that sources its lanes from the Raptor Lake CPU.

First up, we have the official performance stats for these drives as listed by their manufacturers. You can compare these stats with the rest of the drives I tested in the following chart:

AS SSD Benchmark download is a Windows 10 utility software program that tests the performance of solid-state drives. With its help, you can find out the speed of all installed SSDs and take care of any issues that the tests may reveal. The free app performs three separate tests to provide you with conclusive evidence of your driver's general behavior while it copies, reads, and writes data.  The app determines the access time of an SSD, along with its speed and performance capabilities

As the industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely-accepted Disk Benchmark freeware software to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools utilized in the industry, Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid-state drives, RAID arrays as well as the host connection to attached storage. Top drive manufacturers, like Hitachi, build and test every drive using the ATTO Disk Benchmark.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host bus adapters (HBAs), hard drives, and SSD drives, and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software. It measures sequential reads/writes speed, random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed, selects test data (Random, 0Fill, 1Fill),

To test the maximum average transfer speeds of the drives, I used a 100 GB file to test the limits.

The PCMark 10 Storage benchmark is designed to test the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and a selection of popular games. You can test the system drive or any other recognized storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 10 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices.

MSI's Spatium M480 Pro 2 TB is a very fast drive that is designed clearly with enthusiasts in mind. The performance is just where you'd expect, very fast with loads of raw transfer speeds and good firmware support that has been tuned to make sure that the Phison controller is used to its fullest.

As for the thermals, the storage solution does get a bit warmer than the other drives in the test when put under a motherboard M.2 heatsink. We used MSI's MEG Z790 ACE motherboard which comes with a very decent heatsink and it looks like the other drives under the same heatsink ran cooler but only by a small margin. We wouldn't advise using the M480 Pro without the heatsink as it gets super hot and reaches the 100C limit very quickly even under basic loads that utilize the SSD.

If you don't have any extra M.2 heatsinks on your motherboard, then it is advised to go for the heat sink version which comes with a pre-applied and proper solution.

As an enthusiastic product, the MSI Spatium M480 Pro is a very high-end product that performs as advertised but regular users won't feel the difference unless they really know how to push this SSD to its max potential. Furthermore, the difference between the non-Pro and Pro variants in 90% of workloads is going to be barely noticeable. You will see a few cases where things load faster by a few secs but besides that, you won't feel the difference. It is clearly a product that is meant for PC builders who want the best hardware available within the PC. Well in the case that money is not an issue, then you better just go for MSI's Spatium Gen 5 drives which are currently discounted down to just $289.99 US for the 2 TB variant.

But in the case of the MSI Spatium M480 Pro 2 TB, this drive comes in at an incredible value of just $129.99 US and for those looking to expand their gaming storage with a fast storage solution, the M480 Pro is a great choice!

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