Surprisingly good – MSI M480 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD Review
Did you know MSI made SSDs? Well they do, and this one is surprisingly good! It keeps up with my current favourite Gen 4 SSD, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, and actually costs a hair less! Seriously. This is MSI’s SPATIUM M480 PCIe Gen 4×4 SSD – I have the 1TB model although you can get with 2TB if you’d rather – and it boasts some impressive stats. 7GB/s reads, 5.5GB/s writes and 700TBW endurance, all for around £10 less than the Rocket. It uses the same Phison E18 controller, alongside an SK Hynix DRAM cache, and four 256GB 3D TLC NAND flash chips – at least on this 1TB model. That means the drive is single sided, although if you opt for their chungus heatsink it’ll still mount the back anyway because why not.
Speaking of the heatsink, that is an optional accessory to this, although if your motherboard has its own heatsink solution – which if your board supports PCIe Gen 4 it almost certainly does – you don’t need this thing. Save the cash. Still, I’m happy to report that using this heatsink, the drive peaked at just 62°c after almost a full terabyte of constant writes. Not that these drives need all that much cooling anyway, it’s only the controller that needs it, so any motherboard’s solution will work perfectly well.
As for performance, in Crystal Disk Mark, it blasts well past the quoted 7GB/s reads and 5.5GB/s writes, at closing on 7.4GB/s reads and 6GB/s writes (on a fresh drive). That’s incredible performance and is actually faster than the Rocket 4 Plus in reads. It is down almost 1GB/s on writes though, although that’s not as big a deal in reality. With a queue depth of 1, reading and writing sequentially, the M480 absolutely storms the field with nearly 6GB/s in writes and 4.4GB/s in reads, up from 3.5GB/s for both on the Rocket. Even in random 4K writes the M480 pulls ahead slightly.
In AS SSD the Rocket performs a little better overall, especially in the 4K 64 thread test. Very similar standard 4K random reads and writes though, which is good. As for ATTO, the read performance is functionally identical. Seriously, it may as well be the same drive. Where they differ is in the write performance, where the Rocket has a good 500MB/s more than the M480 at anything about 128KB blocks. I should make it clear though, the Rocket 4 Plus I have is the 2TB model, which thanks to having more addressable sectors generally performs better especially on writes. The M480 2TB will likely perform very similarly, if not better, to this.
Finally, my more real world file transfer test. This is basically duplicating a large fileset on the drive itself which stresses reads and writes simultaneously. I can then repeat the test to see how long it takes the drive to throttle, and for the M480 I’m happy to say it did a great job. It sat at 2GB/s for the first 180GB of data, which is 500MB/s HIGHER than the 2TB Rocket 4 Plus – that’s no mean feat. Now it does end up throttling after around 180GB or so of data, but it only drops to around 900MB/s, which is higher than I’ve seen on most drives at their best. Especially considering this was a bit of a stress test, I’m fairly confident in saying this drive will work just fine for everyday use, installing games and everything else like that.
On top of the performance, the fact this is one of the cheaper PCIe Gen 4×4 drives on the market honestly makes it a pretty compelling choice. I wouldn’t bother with the insanely large heatsink, you really don’t need it, but the drive itself gets a solid recommendation from me.
