MSI Spatium M480 2TB Review

Conclusion

Such is the nature of modern drives, with manufacturers buying off-the-shelf controllers and NAND, it’s no surprise to see how many people are leaping on to the storage bandwagon, nor how amazingly similar the performances across drives can be.

The MSI Spatium M480 utilises 96 layer 3D NAND attached to the excellent Phison E18 controller to deliver high levels of performance across the board, whether you’re writing tiny blocks or reading enormous sequential files. We liked how consistent the results were across our wide range of tests, and particular praise needs to be given to the performance of the drive even when the cache and its capacity were near bursting. Many of the drives we’ve tested have the same initial drop off as the Spatium, but they continue to fall until the drive is full. With the MSI M480 though they level off fairly quickly and remain consistent until it has no room left. Impressive.

Temperatures are quite high considering the size of the supplied heatsink. This is one of those situations that you’ll have to be aware of prior to purchase. The fact it’s gold rather than silver is very much a matter of personal preference, but as you saw from our pictures it’s also quite a large heatsink. Given the temperature peak we obtained we wouldn’t recommend running it without a heatsink, but if you have to take the cover off your motherboard to install it you need to make sure it is possible to remove the cover and leave the rest in place. Thankfully the sub 80°C temperatures didn’t affect the performance, but we’d be loath to trust it to a heatspreader.

Underneath that heatsink is the same 96-layer 3D NAND and Phison E18 controller that we saw on the Corsair MP600, and the price is identical too with the reviewed 2TB example retailing around the £340 mark. For that you’re getting a lot of performance in a host of scenarios and looks which you might take to, although are hard to ignore if you don’t.

For such blistering speed across the board the MSI Spatium M480 2TB wins our OC3D Performance Award.

  

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