Introduction

MSI is a world-leading gaming hardware manufacturer that is mostly famous for their graphics cards, motherboards, and laptops. In addition to these, MSI also offers monitors, peripherals, cases, and power supplies. With such a complete lineup, it’s not surprising that MSI entered the SSD market last year.

Today’s review covers the MSI Spatium M480 Pro 2 TB. The “Pro” is the third MSI Spatium M480 variant that has been released over the years. The original “M480” was based on Phison’s E18 controller paired with 96-layer 3D TLC from Micron. The M480 “Play” improved on that by switching to newer 176-layer 3D TLC and also brought PS5 compatibility thanks to a slightly reworked heatsink design. The M480 “Pro” in this review comes without heatsink, but retains the 176-layer NAND flash of the “Play” version. You also get Phison’s newest firmware, which they claim is optimized for DirectStorage—something that nobody can test, because there’s just one game with DirectStorage (Forspoken), and it has a subpar DirectStorage implementation. As expected for a high-end Phison E18 design, a DRAM cache is included with the SSD.

MSI Spatium M480 Pro is available in capacities of 1 TB (unknown), 2 TB ($130) and 4 TB (unknown). Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW, 1400 TBW and 3000 TBW, respectively. MSI includes a five-year warranty with the M480 Pro.