MSI Spatium M480 PLAY 2TB NVMe SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 17 of 17 Published by

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

MSI's Spatium M480 Play will be available very soon. The 2TB model has an MSRP of $329. While this is MSI's first PS5-compatible M.2 SSD, numerous other companies have entered the market. The numbers remain breathtaking. I do want to quickly point out that the 2 TB model as tested is the fastest, as when we look at writes, the 1 TB model tumbles from 6800 MB/sec towards 5500 MB/sec and the 500GB model even drops to 2850 MB/sec. Keep that in mind as these are serious differences. Reads however all remain above 6500~7500 MB/sec with linear en sequential activity. But yeah, Holy Mozes, each time we test a new generation controller on an NVMe SSD, we get a little shocked and awed more. This Phison controller PS5018-E18 based product just offers a stupendous amount of performance. That said, in this conclusion, we are going to talk a little about relativity, though, as breaking that 7 GB/sec marker isn't necessarily going to make your gaming PC a lot faster, and that is a simple truth. The good news is that MSI is making this extraordinary product not super expensive either. Yes, you pay a premium for this 7 GB/sec NVMe SSD, but at  18~19 cents per GB I am not disappointed. This is a super-fast SSD, TLC written, plenty of endurance, and a 5-year warranty. At that money, you'd be hard-pressed to not like this product, eh?


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Do we really need 7000MB/sec storage units?

Um no? This is a premium performance product, often synthetically measured, and you'd need serious workloads to get the best out of it. Your PC isn't going to boot faster as your OS is the bottleneck, your PC games might load a fraction of a second faster, your application load up just as quickly as an NVMe SSD with reads/writes in the 2 GB/sec marker. Guys, this is the honest truth. However, the same folk that purchases a GeForce RTX 3090 or Radeon RX 6900 XT combined with some sort Core i9 or Ryzen 9 series processor, it's for those guys where that last sniff of performance matters, whether that is realistic or not, I'll leave open to discussion.  In retrospect, however, we do have new technologies coming up like DirectStorage. This will allow the graphics card to load textures directly from the SSD bypassing the processor, freeing up processor cycles for other tasks, and speeding up texture load times. In this way, if they have a fast M.2 disk, they will be in the game in less than 5 seconds even on large maps, a negligible time compared to the loading times we are used to today. That technology will be released in the Windows 11 timeframe.

Endurance

MSI offers 350 TBW, 700 TBW, 1,400 TBW, and 3,000 TBW (Terabytes Written) for each model, coupled with an MTBF of up to 1,600,000 Hours (Mean Time Between Failure). We talked so much about this in the past already, endurance, the number of times NAND cells can be written before they burst and shatter into small pieces (well, they just die and are mapped out, any data present on that cell is written to a healthy one). Bigger volume sizes mean more NAND cells; more NAND cells thus increase endurance. For the 2TB model, you'll get a rated 1400 TBW; the 1 TB model marks 700 TB written. So how long does a 1400 TWB storage unit last before NAND flash cells go the way of the dodo? Well, if you are a really extreme user, you might be writing 50 GB per day (normal users likely won't even write that per week), but based on that value, 50GB x 365days= 18.25 TB per year written. So that's over 76 years of usage, half that for the 1TB SSD. And again, writing 50 GB per day is a very enthusiastic value. 

Performance

MSI does not disappoint in terms of performance, claiming sequential read rates of up to 6,500MB/s for the 500GB model and 7,000MB/s for the other three. The 500GB model has a write speed of 2,850MB/s, the 1TB model has a write speed of 5,500MB/s, and the remaining two models have a write speed of 6,800MB/s. The MSI Spatium M480 PLAY is an extremely fast product. Overall read performance increases from 3GB to nearly 7GB/sec. However, trace testing revealed that performance was somewhat lower, and I'll have a guess as to why. The more NAND layers there are, it appears that access times become slower. We're talking milli-fractions of a second here, the access time for the fastest SSD we've ever tested was an average of 46 microseconds. The earlier generation, having fewer stacks, clocked in at (at most) 41 microseconds. It's a pattern we've been observing a while now, the number increases as more additional layers are added; latency.

New Phison B47 Firmware greatly enhances small file performance

The PLAY edition has received the new B47 firmware from Phison. We are still amazed. The new optimized firmware clearly has a grand effect on Random 4 K operation, and that means that small files reads and writes have been sped up by a great degree. To demonstrate compare the RND4K Q32T1 and Q1T1, the differential is grand. The SSDs are virtually the same ...


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2021 - MSI SPatium M480  2TB Gen 4x4

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2022 - MSI M480 PLAY 2TB Gen 4x4 

  

Concluding

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.

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