Performance

Even though the Spatium M480 Play is designed for use with the PS5, it does also work for the PC and our test suite is built around PC performance. Not to mention I haven’t been able to get my hands on a PS5 yet as well. Before getting into our tests I did run CrystalDiskInfo. I just wanted to make sure that the drive was connected at its full speed which is PCIe 4.0 x4 and it was. This also documents the firmware of our test drive for future reference as well. 

My first round of testing was to run the Spatium M480 Play through Crystal Disk Mark 8. Sequential testing is usually a best-case scenario and is what companies use for their specifications and on the front of the box to advertise as drive speeds which in this case the Spatium M480 Play lists up to 7000MB/s for the read speeds and the specifications confirm that again with 6800MB/s listed for the write speeds as well. I have the numbers split up between read and write performance and I also marked the PCIe 3.0 drives blue and the new PCIe 4.0 drives in orange for reference. The Spatium M480 Play did well on its read speeds reaching 6979.03 MB/s which wasn’t far behind the up to 7000 listed. For the sequential write performance, the drive did even better at 6870 MB/s, coming in a little ahead of the listed performance. 

	PCIe 3.0	PCIe 4.0
Crystal Disk Mark 8 - Read	SEQ1M Q8T1	SEQ128K Q32T1	RND4K Q32T16	RND4K Q1T1
WD Blue SN550 1TB	2444.53	2077.36	1075.88	57.88
Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB	4939.59	2871.47	1034.52	74.53
Corsair MP400 1TB	3432.77	1889.56	713.28	61.42
Corsair Force MP600 2TB	4828	1543.31	901.83	41.49
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus 1TB	6468.33	2712.53	455.24	54.68
Crucial P5 Plus 1TB	6697.19	4358.63	1113.7	69.76
Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB	6592.75	3093.11	1085.23	55.14
Patriot P400 1TB	5036.9	3518.47	1059.71	88.06
WD Blue SN570 1TB	3569.34	2681.32	1046.46	65.75
WD Black SN770 1TB	5223.32	4958.17	1034.35	82.24
MSI Spatium M480 Play 2TB	6979.03	4267.59	1315.25	81.22

 

	PCIe 3.0	PCIe 4.0
Crystal Disk Mark 8 - Write	SEQ1M Q8T1	SEQ128K Q32T1	RND4K Q32T16	RND4K Q1T1
WD Blue SN550 1TB	2007.63	2006.4	776.4	290.25
Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB	3633.71	2568.7	920.84	385.73
Corsair MP400 1TB	2021.09	2017.63	1196.42	262.36
Corsair Force MP600 2TB	992.38	982.78	996.22	276.26
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus 1TB	5241.89	5225.25	921.51	402.26
Crucial P5 Plus 1TB	5025.83	4880.38	884.12	240.78
Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB	6899.76	5831.06	1083.12	367.6
Patriot P400 1TB	4830.94	4813.27	846.34	307.12
WD Blue SN570 1TB	3147.13	2893.72	909.47	234.17
WD Black SN770 1TB	4983.07	4980.59	1149.36	295.13
MSI Spatium M480 Play 2TB	6870.73	5863.14	1062.32	357.02

 

While testing in CrystalDiskMark 8 I did also check out the drive’s IOPS performance with the random 4k queue depth of 32 and 1 thread results. I stacked the read and write performance together here because I do believe that the overall drive performance is important, not just one result or the other. The Spatium M480 Play topped our chart here with the combined results and was especially good on the rear IOPS in this test. 

In AS SSD I skipped over the standard test because it is very similar to the CrystalDiskMark tests I prefer to check out one of its sub-tests, the copy benchmark. This moves three files, one that is an ISO, one that is a program, and then a game and times how long each takes. With these being timed, lower is better here. I have all three results stacked to see which drives are best overall. The Spatium M480 Play struggled here for some reason. It had no problem with the ISO file but with the program file, it underperformed significantly and did the same for the game files. 

Next up with PassMark Performance Test 10 I ran their combined synthetic benchmark to get a look at their DiskMark rating. The Spatium M480 Play was the second-fastest drive here with the Fury Renegade being slightly faster and both drives are way out in front of everyone else. 

I then changed my focus back over to IOPS performance and ran the Spatium M480 Play in Anvil’s Storage Benchmark focusing on the 4k queue depth of 16 results from the main test. The read IOPS here weren’t as good as in CrystalDiskMark but they were right behind the P400 and the Renegade. The write IOPS on the other hand helped make up some ground with just the Renegade being faster in the write IOPS and in the combined result.

Sticking with Anvil’s Storage Utilities I did a few more tests. Here I wanted to check out how the drive would react to different queue depths so with the file size set to 4K I ran tests ramping up double each time starting at 1 and up to 128 for reads and 64 for writes. This lets us see if the controller gets overloaded. For the read, queue depth tests the Spatium M480 Play starts off a little behind the SN770 but it along with the P400 and the Renegade jump out ahead at a queue depth of 8, and both stick right with each other the rest of the way up topping the chart at 3060 MB/s at a queue depth of 128 and without any drop off as things scaled up. For the write test the Spatium M480 Play was faster early on and right with the Renegade again where both ramp up at a queue depth of 8 again and run together up to a queue depth of 32 where both drives but especially the Spatium M480 Play drop off for the last 64 QD test. 

For ATTO Benchmark I set it to a queue depth of just 1 but ramped up the file size slowly to see how it would affect performance. For the read test in ATTO, the Spatium M480 Play struggled a little early on compared to the P400 but didn’t drop off like the P400 did, the M480 was slower to ramp up then how the Renegade did but the end result was the same, with it, the Rocket 4.0 Plus, and the Renegade all way out ahead of everything end from 256KB on in the read chart. The write performance was similar including the slower ramp up but after 512KB the M480 Play and the Renegade were both at the top 1500+ ahead of everyone else and the M480 leveled off at 8MB and stayed right at the same performance the rest of the way.

Next up I wanted to look at more real-world performance and for this, I started with PCMark 10 which has an overall full system benchmark for storage and then one focused on data storage drives. In the full system drive benchmark, the Spatium M480 Play did well but didn’t top the charts in either of the tests here with the Renegade, Rocket 4.0 Plus, and the SN770 outperforming it in the data drive benchmark and the SN770 and the Renegade both ahead in the full system drive test.

Next, up for more real-world resting, I did our file transfer tests. You don’t get any more real-world than this. For each drive, I copied the folder filled with files to the drive tested and then back to the Rocket Q4 in our test bench. I used three file types, movies which are large single files, a folder filled with RAW and JPG photos, and then a folder filled with word documents. The Spatium M480 Play struggled in the movie file test, it wasn’t slow but was behind 6 other drives when moving the files to the drive and struggled when moving them back off. Its performance wasn’t bad initially, but that performance fell off around 1/3 of the way into the test. For the picture files which are normally a nice happy medium between the small files and the large files, the M480 didn't do too back when moving the files to the drive but it was slower again taking the files back and it again had the fast initial performance then the drop off. Then for the last test, the M480 did much better and was the second-fastest when transferring the always tough documents but was slower again when moving them back to the PC. 

Windows 11 File Transfers	Movies to Drive	Movies to PC	Pictures to Drive	Pictures to PC	Docs to Drive	Docs to PC
WD Blue SN550 1TB	852	1360	937	1001	2.42	5.32
Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB	2720	2060	1140	1030	5.75	5.2
Corsair MP400 1TB	2140	875	996	1410	2.57	5.98
Corsair Force MP600 2TB	1250	1330	816	1320	2.83	5.48
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus 1TB	2120	2960	254	842	1.63	5.16
Crucial P5 Plus 1TB	2060	2720	1030	1140	5.2	5.75
Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB	2330	3220	857	1270	2.58	5.88
Patriot P400 1TB	2070	2870	981	944	2.86	4.62
WD Blue SN570 1TB	602	325	992	1310	5.14	6.05
WD Black SN770 1TB	2260	2170	605	1210	2.52	6.11
MSI Spatium M480 Play 2TB	1930	494	905	706	5.62	3.87

 

Last up I did take a look at the overall thermals of the Spatium M480 Play. For this I used out Flir and to heat things up I ran AIDA64’s disk benchmark with a linear read for 20 minutes. The PS5 ready heatsink on the other hand gobbled up all of the heat and even after that time the Spatium M480 Play wasn’t really warm at all on the heatsink.