MSI SPATIUM M580 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 FROZR drive review: the new king of speed

You can’t have too much speed — that’s what the new owner of the MSI SPATIUM M580 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 FROZR will say, and he’ll be partially right. This top-of-the-line drive really impresses with its speed performance, but it did not come without a few compromises. We have tested the new product in synthetic benchmarks, working conditions, checked the performance drop as it fills up, measured the temperature, and are ready to share our impressions.

Test bench

• Motherboard MSI MPG B650 CARBON WIFI
• AMD Ryzen 9 7900 processor
• AMD Wraith Prism cooling (BOX)
• RAM DDR5 2x16GB/6000 Kingston ury Beast Black
• AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card (Reference)
• Power supply MSI MPG A1000G PCIE5 1000W
• Body MSI MPG QUIETUDE 100S

Technical characteristics MSI SPATIUM M580 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 FROZR

Specifications MSI SPATIUM M580 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 FROZR
Volume	1 TB	2 TB	4 TB
Controller	PHISON E26
Memory	3D NAND
Cache	2 GB LPDDR4	4 GB LPDDR4	8 GB LPDDR4
Form factor	M.2 2280
Interface	PCIe Gen5x4, NVMe 2.0
Operating temperatures	0°C – 70°C
Power consumption (W)	11,5
Reading speed (MB/s)	13700	14600	14100
Write speed (MB/s)	10300	12700	12600
Working resource (TB)	700	1400	3000
Working resource (hours)	1600000

 

Completeness and packaging

The device is packed in a standard box with cardboard seals. The hero of the review has a complete FROZR radiator, which has already been introduced to readers in the review of the younger model MSI SPATIUM M570 FROZR. Everything is assembled and ready for installation. It makes sense to disassemble the heatsink only for owners of the most expensive motherboards that already have giant bundled heatsinks.

The size of the MSI SPATIUM M580 FROZR cooler is comparable to a box cooler. Considering the strong heating of PCI-E 5.0 drives, this does not seem irrational. The only problem may be the compatibility of components due to the size of the radiator, which will be discussed in a separate section below.

Working performance of MSI SPATIUM M580 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 FROZR

We tested the drive twice: at 1% and 96% capacity. This way, we were able to see the real-world operating conditions and see how the drive performed in the most severe scenarios.

The first Crystal Disk Mark test demonstrates almost 15 GB/s read and 13 GB/s write speeds when working with large files. After loading 1791 GB of data to the disk, the read speed remained almost unchanged, but the write speed slowed down by 3 times.

This is a minor drop compared to how Chinese «PCI-E 4.0» drives from Aliexpress behave (a 50-fold drop in speed is possible). The performance degradation when writing small files is almost unnoticeable.

A similar situation is observed in the ATTO Benchmark test. MSI SPATIUM M580 FROZR works smoothly and stably for file sizes of any size. The speeds are very high, unattainable for any flagship of the previous generation. Writing and reading files from 2 MB allows you to see 11-13 GB/s.

More detailed tests of Aida 64 brought a surprise. Despite the top speeds, we got rare drawdowns, which can be seen in the graphs. Especially surprising was the access graph, where the average was 0.03 ms, and the maximum was 1.47 ms.

What’s equally interesting is that the 96% full drive was more stable. Those strange peaks could have been the cause of the operating system’s instability, but Windows 11 was running on a different drive, not the test drive.

Under such conditions, all three drives were 100% loaded, and the MSI SPATIUM M580 FROZR was resting. The bins were operating at a third of their capacity. When it was filled to 70-80% of its maximum capacity, we could see load surges of up to 50%.

Only benchmarks or internal copying of thousands of small files can fully load MSI SPATIUM M580 FROZR. This company of different kinds of drives (like a group of eccentrics: beautiful, poor and fat) had no chance to overcome such a mastodon.

Energy consumption and heating

The manufacturer claims a maximum power consumption of 11.5 watts under full load. Since the MSI SPATIUM M580 FROZR rarely operates at 10-30% of its capacity, it is no different from other drives in this regard.

You don’t have to worry about the temperature either because with such a huge heatsink, it’s literally impossible to overheat it. The Crystal Disk Mark test we passed 4–5 times in a row never raised the temperature to 50 °C. When you just use the computer without benchmarks, the temperature drops sharply to 30-35 °C at room temperature of 20 °C.

Experience using MSI SPATIUM M580 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 FROZR

Testing MSI SPATIUM M580 FROZR was not an easy task. This model made us spend a lot of time installing it because, as it turned out, the hero of the review is incompatible with the MSI B650 CARBON WI-FI motherboard.

To install the drive, we had to remove the radiators from the power supply system, because the tubes from the SSD cooler were resting against the motherboard radiator. To do this, you need to remove the motherboard from the case, disconnect all cables and unscrew nine bolts, then unscrew four bolts, disconnect the RGB backlight of the radiator.

I also had to remove the air cooling be quiet! Dark Rock Elite. This huge tower is too wide and rested on the high radiator of the MSI SPATIUM M580 FROZR. This is what awaits all owners of top towers with 140 mm fans.

So, the only option left is to install a liquid cooling system MSI MEG CORELIQUID S360. Since I only need to test the drive for a few days and then remove the motherboard to return its native heatsinks, I decided to install the boxed AMD Wraith Prism which attaches in 30 seconds.

It is possible that many other PCI-E 5.0 motherboards will have a similar problem, and it is also a reason to think about owners of massive air cooling systems. This all left an unpleasant impression, but the drive itself is great and shows amazing speed results.

To fully load it, you need to simultaneously copy data from two 2 TB Kingston KC3000 or Samsung 980 Pro drives, and it’s not clear that it will be enough. As tests have shown, only other PCI-E 5.0 flagships can match it. It’s a kind of «RTX 4090» in the world of drives.

Price and competitors

Unofficial cost MSI SPATIUM M580 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 FROZR is more than UAH 16,000. For this money, you can buy a top-of-the-line 4 TB PCI-E 4.0 drive, or spend another 1000-2000 UAH and get two SATA SSDs of 4 TB each. You have to overpay for the top speed, so at the beginning of sales, the hero of the review is not a rational purchase. Let’s take a look at several analogs with similar speeds.

MSI SPATIUM M570 PRO PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 FROZR is only slightly inferior to the M580, having an identical heat sink.

Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 12000 — a strong competitor that also boasts good cooling.

A-Data Legend 970 SLEG-970 runs on an identical controller and has similar characteristics, although the radiator is more modest.