MSI Spatium M480 PLAY 2TB NVMe SSD review - Specifications & Features

Specifications & Features

MSI is offering three versions of the M480 PLAY SSD; 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and even a 4TB model. For endurance, our tested 2TB model has been rated at 1400 TBW. The series will be fitted with TLC written 3D NAND flash memory (vertically stacked over 172 layers). This allows the company to offer proper storage volumes. So instead of using Planar NAND, 3D NAND is used. 3D TLC NAND is physical vertical NAND cell stacking not to be confused with chip stacking in a multi-chip package. In 3D NAND, NAND layers, not chips, are stacked in a single IC. The good news is continued cost reduction, smaller die sizes and more capacity per NAND chip. Also, installed NAND toolsets in the wafer fabs can, for the most part, be reused, thereby extending the useful life of fab equipment. Unleashed by the PCIe 4.0 ready AMD B550/X570 chipset and Intel Rocket Lake-S / Z590, the SSD reaches up to an advertised 7000 MB/sec sequential read – fourteen times the performance of many SATA SSDs and seventy times faster than some hard disk drives. The performance stems from the hugely increased bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 (PCI-Express Generation 4), a feature that will be made available to customers for the first time as part of the AMD X570 chipset and 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen Desktop Processors. Easily fitting into a PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, the NVMe interface has been bumped upwards to the new 1.4 protocol and high-density TLC NAND combine with a Phison PS5018-E18 controller to enable a new level of single-drive SSD performance. Boasting staggering numbers.

Phison PS5018-E18 controller

Taiwan's Phison is known for its flash NAND controllers and became very influential the past few years. The PS5018-E18 controller is based on a Cortex-R5 ×3, processor design and is manufactured at TSMC 12nm. By bringing this controller towards NVMe revision 1.4 the transfer rate per channel has increased from 800MT/s towards 1200 Increased to MT/s. And when you math that, that means a maximum transfer speed of roughly 7GB/s for both sequential reads and writes. Here's a nice value as well, random read/write performance would be listed at 1 million IOPS, and all that with an expected peak energy consumption of 3W for the controller alone