MSI SPATIUM M480 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD Review

A Closer Look

The stock drive comes in the box along with its option heatsink hardware. However, the drive its self is pretty much a standard looking M.2 drive and will certainly fit in any normal M.2 slot on your motherboard, notebook or integrated system.

Since I have the 2TB model, there are eight chips on here, four 256GB chips on this side. The chips are 96-layer Micron 3D TLC Flash.

And of course, four more on this site, giving us the 2TB total. However, the drive is available in sizes starting at 500GB.

The Phison controller is the PS5018-E18, and there are two 1GB DRAM chips, giving the drive 2GB of DDR4 DRAM cache.

One thing I do like is that the sticker over the top actually looks like the heatsink that is included in the box; it’s a neat little touch.

However, it comes with a real version of that heatsink. It’s a chunky beast too, and if you don’t have a decent integrated heatsink on your motherboard for this drive, then I strongly suggest you use it.

While the drive will work well enough without cooling, this is a pretty extreme drive. Putting persistent load on it will make it get warm, and if it gets too hot, it’ll throttle its self till it cools down. You slide the drive into the backplate.

Then sandwich it between the heatsink and backplate.

And then use six small screws (which are included) to secure it.

Talk about secure! Alas, look how tall it is! If there’s a GPU above your M.2 slot, this will absolutely block it.