MSI's Beastly M580 Frozr PCIe 5 SSD Lands With 14,600MB/s Reads And A Monster Cooler
It's not just fast CPUs and graphics cards that can benefit from beefy coolers, so too can the latest crop of solid state drives (SSDs) that shuttle data through the PCI Express 5.0 bus. That being the case, we suspect we'll see more drives emerge with towering coolers like the one MSI has plopped on its Spatium M580 Frozr, which the company claims reduces temperatures by up to 20°C.
Bolstered cooling is needed to facilitate the kind of read and write speeds that PCIe 5.0 x4 drives are capable of achieving. In this case, MSI is touting up to a blistering 14,600MB/s (14.6GB/s) of sequential read performance and up to 12,700MB/s (12.7GB/s) for sequential writes.
Both of those metrics are notably faster than MSI's Spatium M570 Pro we reviewed just a few short weeks ago. And in terms of the rated sequential read speed, the M580 comes within striking distance of the maximum throughput provided by PCIe 5.0 x4, which is around 15,750MB/s (15.75GB/s). We won't see any PCIe 5.0 models hit that rated speed because there is overhead to account for, but as we saw with previous-generation PCIe 4.0 models, drive makers will continue to push the envelope to get as close as they can.
The special sauce to MSI's recipe for these kinds of speeds the pairing of 232-layer 3D NAND flash memory chips with Phison's performance-grade E26 controller. The M580 also boasts a DRAM cache buffer and SLC cache to speed up performance.
Even so, the Achilles heel to these breakneck speeds is that heat buildup can ruin the party by throttling performance when things get too toasty. Hence why MSI has slapped a giant "revolutionary passive tower heastink cooler" on top of the M580.
"This cooler, pre-mounted on the SSD, incorporates three heatpipes known as CORE pipes and a plethora of aluminum fins, maximizing surface area for enhanced cooling capability and airflow passthrough. By reducing operating temperatures by up to 20 degrees Celsius, this heatsink unleashes extreme performance and sustains maximum storage throughput even under heavy workloads," MSI says.
Fortunately, while the cooler is tall, it's not especially wide. According to MSI, it will fit just fine in the typical gap between a motherboard's M.2 slot and the graphics card. Naturally this will depend entirely on your motherboard's layout.
MSI is offering three capacities, each with different speed ratings. They include...
- 4TB (8GB LPDDR4 cache): 14,100MB/s seq. reads, 12,600MB/s seq. writes
- 2TB (4GB LPDDR4 cache): 14,600MB/s seq. reads, 12,700MB/s seq. writes
- 1TB (2GB LPDDR4 cache): 13,700MB/s seq. reads, 10,300MB/s seq. writes
It's interesting that the middle capacity (2TB) is also the fastest, as typically speeds tend to increase as capacity goes up in any given SSD product line. All three capacities are speedy drives, though.
MSI has not said when the Spatium M580 Frozr will be available or how much it will cost. Additionally, its main product page throws a 404 error, though we did find a product page on its German portal. All three capacities will carry a 5-year warranty.
