Introduction

MSI is a world-leading hardware manufacturer that is mostly famous for their graphics cards, motherboard, 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 is entering the SSD market now.



The Spatium M.2 SSD Series by MSI was announced a few weeks ago, and today, we're proud to be among the first sites to get you a review of these new solid-state drives.

With the Spatium lineup, MSI focuses on PCI-Express 4.0. Two drives are available at this time, the Spatium M470 (this review) and Spatium M480 (our review, also posted today). These will be joined by a third PCIe Gen 3-based drive in the coming weeks.

The Spatium M470 is based on the Phison E16 controller paired with 96-layer TLC NAND flash from Toshiba. Going by the number "4" in "M470," you probably already guessed right that the SSD uses the PCI-Express 4.0 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth over PCI-Express Gen 3. Two DDR4-2400 DRAM chips provide 1 GB of memory for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The MSI Spatium M470 comes in capacities of 1 TB ($189) and 2 TB (pricing unknown). Endurance for these models is set to 1600 TBW and 3300 TBW respectively. MSI includes a five-year warranty with the MSI Spatium M470 SSD.