MSI Spatium M480 1TB

[HEXUS]

Another entrant into the high-performance SSD ring. We find out how good it is.

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[excalibur1814]

Where's the Samsung 980 Pro?

[Tarinder]

Where's the Samsung 980 Pro?

As we have other high-end drives on the roster, we are getting one in asap.

[Tunnah]

Gold fins, because appealing to 80s coke dealers' fashion sense is always a win.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

[philehidiot]

Hmmm, bling.

This is the drive for the Donald. He should put his name to it.

It's the top drive. The best. No one makes better drives.

[ksdp37]

How does the heat sink fit on the newer drives as when I look at my slots, they blocked by the GPU and another card, so can't see how these chunky coolers are supposed to fit on the drives.

[philehidiot]

How does the heat sink fit on the newer drives as when I look at my slots, they blocked by the GPU and another card, so can't see how these chunky coolers are supposed to fit on the drives.

Silence you fool, worship the bling!! To answer your question, some mobos come with integrated low profile heatsinks. I think it's a matter of luck and / or design. Some mobos will be designed with M.2 drives needing extra cooling in mind and some won't. I bought a Corsair MP600 with heat sink for my Gigabyte X570 board without even considering the potential for issues and got away with it.

This being said, I don't think most consumers have any use for such a fast SSD but I do see there are some games which do rely on fast storage for loading resources on the fly and increasing draw distance. Myself, I would not have bought this MP600 if it wasn't similarly priced to other models that were on the table and also going to give me longevity with PCI-e 4.0 and far greater endurance and performance than I'll ever need.

I think the vast majority of people are being oversold on SSDs right now and having a real use for something requiring a sink is really an edge case.

To be blunt, I don't notice any significant performance improvement for day to day stuff loading from a SATA SSD or the M.2 drive. Many of my games are stored on the SATA drives as they are so large and I want the expensive, fast storage to stay free for things like throwing video files around. I have accumulated many SATA SSDs over the years which is why I use them.

As ever, your mileage may vary and you may have excellent reasons for buying a top of the range M.2 drive. I certainly wouldn't advocate people buying SATA drives except for intermediate mass storage (games where loading speeds aren't a massive issue or less well used software, in situations where you have limited M.2 slots and lots of SATA ports) as they aren't really cheap enough Vs M.2 drives Vs the performance deficit.

[kalniel]

we'd recommend first getting rid of MSI's stickers if going down this route

The 'warranty void if removed' stickers?

[philehidiot]

The 'warranty void if removed' stickers?

I seem to remember those carry zero legal weight and they'd have to prove you removing them caused the fault in question. But I may be wrong and, like me with Blizzard and a faulty product, they'll often just (try and) do what they like and consumer law be damned. Took me a lot of time and effort to get a refund from them and that's partly what they are relying on.