MSI is now a player in SSDs. The Spatium M480 HS, the flagship of the gaming hardware company's fledgling consumer SSD line, is a PCI Express 4.0-compatible M.2 solid-state drive with sizzling rated and tested sequential read-write speeds, especially in the 2TB capacity we tested ($444.99, with models starting at $229.99). The "HS" in the drive's name refers to its bronze-tinted, finned aluminum heatsink, which adds only $10 to the sticker price over the non-heatsink version (the MSI Spatium M480). Unless you're outfitting a laptop or a desktop motherboard that's too cramped to fit this device, the small extra outlay to add the heatsink is money well spent. That said, although based on our testing the M480 HS's overall performance was quite good, even without the heatsink it's pricey for what it offers.

Meet MSI's Peak SSD

The M480 HS and M480 join two other Spatium M.2 SSDs in MSI's initial launch. The MSI Spatium M470, also a PCI Express 4.0 drive, has lower sequential read (up to 5,000MBps) and write speed ratings and more modest performance in our testing. The Spatium M370, a PCIe 3.0 drive, has a write speed rating of up to 2,400MBps. All are available in 1TB and 2TB capacities in the U.S., with 500GB versions—and, in the case of the M370, a 256GB model—sold abroad.

A four-lane PCI Express (PCIe) 4.0 drive, the M480 HS comes in the M.2 Type-2280 "gumstick" form factor common among today's internal SSDs. It employs the NVMe 1.4 protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus, and features Phison's top-of-the-line E18 controller. The memory is based on Micron's 96-layer 3D triple-level-cell (TLC) NAND flash. (If these terms make little sense to you, be sure to check out our handy SSD dejargonizer.)

At 23 cents per gigabyte for the 1TB model and 22 cents for the 2TB version, the Spatium M480 HS is on the pricey side, even for a high-performance PCIe 4.0 drive. By contrast, you'll spend 18 cents per gigabyte for either the 1TB or 2TB Crucial P5 Plus, 19 or 18 cents per gig respectively for the 1TB and 2TB versions of the Editors' Choice award-winning Samsung SSD 980 Pro, and 16 cents per gig for the ADATA XPG Gammix S70 in either 1TB or 2TB. The MSI Spatium M470, which lacks a heatsink, goes for 18 cents per gigabyte for 1TB and 16 cents a gig for the 2TB stick. 

A drive's durability is measured in terabytes written (TBW), an estimate—according to the manufacturer—of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. (TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capacity.) MSI's warranty for this drive is good for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in writes, whichever comes first. 

The durability ratings for the M480 HS are 700TBW for the 1TB drive and 1,400TBW for the 2TB device. This is typical of similar drives—both the Crucial P5 Plus and Samsung SSD 980 Pro are rated at 600TBW and 1,200TBW for their 1TB and 2TB models respectively. That said, a few PCIe 4.0 drives offer considerably higher durability ratings; the MSI Spatium M470 rates 1,600TBW for 1TB and 3,300TBW for 2TB. At the other extreme, the Mushkin Delta—which uses less write-durable QLC memory—is rated at just 200TBW for 1TB, 400TBW for 2TB, and 800TBW for 4TB.

The M480 HS's sequential read speed rating of 7,000MBps—coupled with a 6,800MBps write rating for the 2TB version we tested and a 5,500MBps write rating for the 1TB model—puts it among the SSD speed elite. Only a handful of other drives—among them the Samsung 980 Pro, Mushkin Gamma, and ADATA S70—have read-speed ratings that put them in the vaunted "7,000 club," although none of those have managed to post read scores much in excess of 6,500MBps in our testing.

The M480 lacks a full SSD management software suite along the lines of Samsung's Magician or Crucial's Storage Executive. It does offer data security and error-correction capabilities including S.M.A.R.T., Trim, low-density parity check (LDPC) error-correction code, end-to-end data protection, and AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption.

Testing the MSI Spatium M480 HS: Sizzling Sequential and 4K Performance

We test PCI Express 4.0 SSDs on a desktop system that includes an MSI Godlike X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen 9 CPU. The testbed has 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz and an Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card. (See more about how we test SSDs.)

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The M480 HS's heatsink, which fastens to the drive by means of a bracket and an M.2-sized strip of tacky, stretchy thermal material, is removable—in fact, drive, heatsink, bracket, and thermal tape come as separate components, and you assemble it like a sandwich. We tested this puppy with the heatsink attached, rather than relying on the standard over-slot heatsink already in place on our testbed's motherboard as we usually do.

PCMark 10 Overall Storage and Trace Tests

PCMark 10's overall storage benchmark, from UL—the world's leading independent benchmark developer—runs a full slate of typical drive-access tasks. The numbers listed below as the Overall Score are the software's sanctioned results, representing how well a drive does throughout the entire PCMark 10 run.

After the Overall Score are some more granular measures derived from PCMark 10's background "traces." These tests simulate how quickly a drive is capable of launching a particular program—or, in the first case, completing the Windows 10 startup procedure.

Next comes a game-launching test set, which simulates how quickly a drive can read shallow-depth small random 4K packages, one of the more commonly used file-block sizes for game installations. The drives are also put through a launch test for Adobe creative apps. As anyone who works with video or images in Photoshop or Premiere Pro can tell you, these powerful programs can leave you waiting impatiently.

Finally there are the PCMark 10 copy tests, also derived from PCMark 10 traces. These numbers might look low compared with the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, charted below, but that's due to the way this score is calculated and the nature of (and differences between) the source data sets.

The Spatium M480 HS's PCMark 10 Overall Storage score of 2,334 was in line with other PCIe 4.0 SSDs and, as we had expected, faster than the 1TB Spatium M470 (score 2,066). Its scores in the PCMark 10 trace tests were middling, although it excelled in the ISO file and copy tests.

Crystal DiskMark Sequential Speed and AS-SSD Copy Tests

The Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests provide a more traditional speed measure, simulating best-case transfers of large files. After them come a trio of tests, which consist of copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another, using the AS-SSD benchmarking utility.

The M480 HS's sequential read/write results in Crystal DiskMark (6,458MBps read and 6,504MBps write) are short of the drive's sequential speed ratings of 7,000MBps read and 6,800MBps write (for the 2TB version we tested), but the read speed is still one of the fastest and the write speed is the zippiest we've encountered, edging out the Mushkin Gamma. The MSI's Crystal DiskMark 4K read and write speeds were also well above average. In the AS-SSD copy tests, the M480 HS's overall results were average, with program speed slightly above par and game speed a tad below.

A Zippy, If Costly, PCIe 4.0 SSD

With the Spatium M480 HS, MSI has launched an appealing high-performance PCI Express 4.0 internal SSD. Between its blistering sequential scores, its impressive 4K read and write performance, and great ISO and file-copy results, the drive proved its mettle as a speedster in our testing. The finned heatsink is both practical and a thing of beauty, and its addition is worth the modest extra outlay over the naked M480. Still, the M480 HS is on the expensive side compared with similar products. But if you've got the cash and the heatsink will fit in your rig, you won't be disappointed.