MSI Spatium M480 2TB Review

Up Close

If you like your packaging to represent the investment you’ve made in the product for showing off on shelves you’ll be pleased to see the gold and black arrangement on the MSI Spatium M480 box. Clean, simple, gold.

Within the box you have an awful lot of spare space. We’d call it white space in deference to the endless website redesigns that seem hell-bent on making the desktop experience a nightmare, but of course the foam inside the Spatium M480 is black. Let’s pretend it’s in dark mode.

Important instructions are important. We know we can’t be the only people who built something in a hurry only to leave on a bit of film somewhere and send our temperatures somewhere north of the Sun.

We know mounting a heatsink to a drive is a matter of moments and simplicity itself, but it still odd to find a drive that is priced at this level making you put it together yourself. Of course the argument is that if you want to mount it beneath your motherboard heatsink it’s better than having to take a heatsink off to do so, but still. It’s like buying a car and finding the engine delivered separately.

The heatsink when mounted in place is certainly taller than we were expecting. If ever a drive was designed to be used with a motherboard that let you remove the M.2 heatspreaders individually then the Spatium M480 is it. Certainly if your motherboard has the popular single cover for all the M.2 ports you perhaps need to consider either a different drive or running this naked.

Lastly the colour is an odd choice unless you own a gold-hued motherboard or can bury it behind a chimney-mounted GPU. Still, it will stand out, and we don’t just mean the verticality of the heatsink.