Overall and Final Verdict
The MSI Spatium M480 Play isn’t a bad first look at MSI’s jump into SSDs. Like with the rest of their components, MSI has jumped right into the higher-end SSD market with gaming in mind and the Spatium M480 Play fits with that perfectly. I like the styling that they went with, the black and grey finish on the heatsink, and slipping in the MSI Gaming logo as well. The built-in heatsink has both its upsides and downsides. For cooling, it made a huge difference. I wasn’t able to heat it up at all really. It also is what gives the M480 its PS5 compatibility but if you are planning on using it for PC use it could also give issues with some higher-end motherboards which often have their own heatsink designs built-in.
The drive itself was surprisingly hot and cold for its performance testing. In almost all of our tests, it topped the charts, especially with its nearly 7000 MB/s read and 6800+MB/s write performance. It was also great in our IOPS tests. But it struggled in some of our real-world tests with performance drop off part of the way into the tests and in AS SSD’s file transfer test as well. This doesn’t hurt its potential as a gaming drive though, but I wouldn’t really look to use it for storage that you would access a lot.
Something else I should point out is that the Spatium M480 Play is just one of three different Spatium M480 designs. MSI has had a design with a larger heatsink out for PCs as well as one without a heatsink at all. So the Play model is focused more on PS5 use with the option to use on a PC as well. Its pricing is unknown right now as well, the two other M480 designs are available to buy but the Spatium M480 Play isn’t for sale yet so we don’t know if the pricing is going to be reasonable or not just yet. I would guess that it will fall in between the two other M480 models which for the 2TB model like tested today is $329.99 for the non-heatsink version and $359.99 for the large heatsink version. For comparison, the FURY Renegade that the Spatium M480 Play performed similarly to is $356 right now without a heatsink so it looks like MSI will be close to the mark assuming the Spatium M480 Play comes out in that range.
Live Pricing: HERE
