As one of the leading players in the hardware field, Taiwanese giant MSI has long ignored the burgeoning gaming storage market. However, in 2021, the ice broke and the Taiwanese presented a new family of elite gaming SSD Spatium, built on the basis of 3D TLC NAND memory. Most of them belong to the M.2 format, support the NVMe 1.4 protocol, work on the PCI-E 4.0 bus and show impressive speed performance when reading and writing information.


The most interesting option in the Spatium lineup is the M480 Play, which is the company's first SSD with "Ready for PlayStation 5" certifications. The drive claims a maximum sequential read speed of 7,000 MB/s, which exceeds Sony's requirements, while random access performance reaches an impressive 700,000 IOPS. Depending on the volume of the drive itself, the amount of cache memory ranges from 512 MB to 2 GB. To prevent overheating, the Spatium M480 is equipped with an aluminium heatsink, the dimensions of which have been designed taking into account the internal layout of the components in the PS5 console.

In addition to models with support for the PCI-E 4.0 bus, the Spatium series has released several more modest compact M.2 drives. These are classic SSDs of the past generation with high-speed SLC caching and selective 96-layer flash memory, however, due to the use of the PCI-E 3.0 bus, their linear read and write speeds are slightly below the elite rates and are in the range of 3000 - 3300 MB / With. In terms of price and performance, these drives are a versatile choice for work and gaming builds that do not require high, but not record-breaking data transfer speeds.