MSI Spatium M580 FROZR Review: Super-Fast SSD Tower Of Power

	MSI Spatium M580 FROZR: 2TB for $329 The MSI Spatium M580 FROZR is a blazing-fast, Phison-based M.2 PCIe Gen 5 SSD, with a massive tower-style cooler that's ideal for any modern creator and gaming workloads.
	Class Leading Performance Native PCIe Gen 5 Interface Low Latency Great For Gamers And Creators	Price Premium Won't Fit In PS5 Very Tall, Relative To Other SSDs

MSI Spatium M580 FROZR SSD Specifications And Features

Find The MSI Spatium M580 FROZR SSD PCIe 5 SSD @ Amazon

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MSI is currently offering the Spatium M580 FROZR in three capacities – 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB, but it’s the two largest drives that offer the best performance. The 1TB model, while still relatively fast, doesn’t quite match the peak sequential capabilities of the 2TB and 4TB models. What you see pictured here is the 2TB model, but they all look identical, thanks to that distinctive cooler.

As mentioned, the MSI Spatium M580 FROZR Pro is built around a PCIe Gen 5 Phison E26 controller, paired to Micron 232-layer NAND flash memory, and some LPDDR4 DRAM Cache (with capacities ranging from 2GB to 8GB, depending on the size of the drive).

MSI’s specifications claim peak reads and writes for the 2TB Spatium M580 FROZR at 14.6GB/s and 12.7GB/s, respectively, which puts the drive among the best enthusiast-class SSD available. And like other premiums SSDs available today, MSI offers a 5 year warranty and supports all of the advance features you’d expect, like TRIM, encryption, etc.

Underneath all that metal is a common M.2 2280 gumstick. But considering these high-end Phison / Micron-based drives can consume more than 11 watts under load, MSI decided to ensure thermals, and the potential throttling that can come as a result of excess heat, would not be concern with the Spatium M580 FROZR. As long as there is some airflow over this thing, the M580 can run at top speed for extended periods.

There’s a tall nickel-plated aluminum fin-stack on the Spatium M580 FROZR, linked to a heat-plate by three heat-pipes, that rests directly atop the Phison E26 controller, top-side NAND and DRAM cache. While all high-end E26-based drives require some sort of cooling, few go as far as MSI.

Although it helps sustained performance, and will be ideal for for large file transfers and games that leverage DirectStorage, there are a few downsides to that beefy cooler. Without adequate clearance around the M.2 slot, it simply may not fit on some motherboards. It also requires the complete removal of any stylized M.2 heat plates included with most enthusiast motherboards available today. The cooler obviously adds some cost as well, and precludes it from fitting in the PS5.

MSI Spatium M580 FROZR SSD SSD Benchmarks

Under each test condition, the SSDs showcased here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and Windows 11 was fully updated. Windows Firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing, and Focus Assist was enabled to prevent any interruptions.

HotHardware's Test System:

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IOMeter Benchmarks

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; a custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access. Queue depths from 1 to 16 were tested...

SiSoft SANDRA 2022

Next, we used SiSoft SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant for some quick tests. Here, we used the File System Test and provide the results from our comparison SSDs. Read and write performance metrics, along with the overall drive score, are detailed below.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5KB through 64MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

Once again, in terms of sequential read and write performance, regardless of the transfer size, the MSI Spatium M580 FROZR SSD competes with the best of them and is among the fastest drives we've tested to date.

Read and write IO throughput is also very good with the MSI Spatium M580 FROZR. It doesn't pull away at any particular point, but it remains in the mix with the fastest drives across the range of transfer sizes.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark

Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test is interesting because it uses a mix of compressible and non-compressible data and outputs both Read and Write throughput of the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.

The compressibility of the data being transferred across the drives we tested has virtually no impact on performance. The slight variations with some of the drives fall within the margin of error for this test. Regarding the MSI Spatium M580 FROZR specifically, its read and write performance here is top-notch, and trades blows at the top of the charts.