MSI's new PCIe 5.0 SSD runs so hot, it ships with a self-contained liquid cooler

[Shawn Knight]

Editor's take: MSI has outdone itself at CES 2024 with the introduction of a new PCIe 5.0 SSD that apparently runs so hot, it needs its own custom liquid cooling solution. Do you need a liquid-cooled SSD? Of course not. Sure, such a system could help eke out a bit more performance from an already super-fast platform but at this level, you're more or less splitting hairs. It's neat from a hardware enthusiast perspective, but it's an unnecessary risk that's mostly just for the brag factor.

The MSI Spatium M580 PCIe NVMe M.2 2 TB Frozr Liquid (say that three times fast) was spied on the show floor by the crew over at Tom's Hardware. According to accompanying literature, the drive is capable of read speeds of up to 14,000 MB/s and writes of up to 12,000 MB/s – blistering fast, no doubt, but is the juice worth the squeeze?

The Spatium M570 Pro Frozr we profiled late last year featured a towering air cooler with sequential read speeds up to 12,400 MB/s and sequential writes of 11,800 MB/s, which MSI said was ideal for demanding content creators, professionals, and gamers.

The SPATIUM M580 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 FROZR LIQUID employs the Phison E26 controller and boasts top continuous read and write speeds of 14,000 MB/s and 12,000 MB/s, available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities.https://t.co/iXzhU5nbip

– Gray Hats (@the_yellow_fall) January 10, 2024

MSI's M580 is paired with what is essentially a small AIO cooling solution, complete with heat transfer base, integrated water pump, a mini radiator, and a blower-style fan to dissipate heat from the fins. The specs sheet notes the drive should fit any M.2 mount, and that the cooler makes full contact with the controller and flash modules.

Details such as a potential price point and launch date aren't yet known. MSI did say the drive would be available in 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB capacities.

Among other things, CES is a proving ground for new ideas. It's debatable whether or not MSI will actually bring the M580 to market in its current iteration – at this point, they're likely looking to get feedback from the community before making that decision.

For almost every use case, a quality PCIe Gen 4 M.2 is more than fast enough for daily use, runs cool enough with even a basic passive heatsink, and won't break the bank.

Image credit: Future

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https://www.techspot.com/news/101476-msi-new-pcie-50-ssd-runs-hot-ships.html

 

[Superconductor]

Great. Another active cooling system destined to fail inside some MTBF scatter-plot of randomness. And on storage of all things...

 

[hahahanoobs]

Damn. It's fast, but I'm also glad I don't need this!

 

[p51d007]

Good grief!

 

[yRaz]

It's fast but only in one way, sequential read and writes. I just don't see these new drives being useful with all the compromises they come with. I'm starting to thing that Optane died because of drives like this, you'll never see the performance numbers advertised outside of benchmarks. I honestly have SATA SSDs that perform fine and for a lot less. I have a 512GB NVME drive as a boot drive but my games drive is still a SATA SSD. Also, my storage is still made up of HDDs.

I see this stuff as cool but far from necessary. I see the m.2 form factor most useful in laptops and handheld systems. I plan on replacing my desktop with the Minisform V3 tablet when it is released. For factors like that are made possible with M.2 but I still think the ultra high-end NVME drives are laughably unnecessary. They don't even work as advertised because how they're benchmarked doesn't reflect real world usage. Under real world usage these aren't much faster than the sata 6Gbps SSD I've been running in my main rig for years.

 

[godrilla]

Who knew when they meant the price of flash is going up is because the added cost of active cooling like this .
If one of the target demographic is a gamer, are their any scenarios with significant delta time saved or advantages vs let's say cheaper passive cooled nvme drives that saturate pcie 4.0 bandwidth like the 990 pros?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Looks like I'll be sticking with old school NVME Gen 3 drives for the foreseeable future...

 

[brucek]

This doesn't look viable for the gamer market yet. It needs more RGB lighting.

 

[TheBigT42]

It's fast but only in one way, sequential read and writes.

That is not 100% true. The sequential read and writes is marketing. It is the speed of the Random 4K read writes that really makes a difference.
The Faster NVMEs will have a higher Random 4k Read Write.

On my Samsung 870 EVO 4TB Sata
Random 4k Read 261 MB/s Write 206 MB/s

On my Seagate Firecuda 530 NVME
Random 4k Read 752 MB/s Write 402 MB/s

You are correct 95% of people won't be able to tell the difference of Windows running on an SATA SSD vs NVME.

 

[Adhmuz]

The pinnacle of diminishing returns!

I have to ask, what are "top continuous read and write speeds" Are there lower continuous read and write speeds? Is this in some cherry picked scenario designed to provide the highest number MSI can boast about? Realistically results will never be what is being claimed/advertised?

Also, you have to start to question how much weight a M.2 slot can actually accommodate, it's a slot designed for something that can weight nearly nothing in heatsinkless form, or even be held down with a large integrated motherboard heatsink. Was it really designed for this in the first place?

 

[RandomWAN]

Looks like I'll be sticking with old school NVME Gen 3 drives for the foreseeable future...

Gen 4 drives don't need all that much cooling and with the built-in heatsinks most motherboards have anymore, you won't see any temperature concerns.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

Taking away the extreme heat, high prices, high power consumption, the need for cooling, gen 5 has delivered nothing to improve real world experience even compared to Gen 3 drives. Unless all you do all day is large sequential file transfers, they are an utter waste of time, effort and money. They have barely moved the bar on random transfers but somehow quote massive random IOPs far better than Optane, yet perform far worse. Yet to see a single tech site call them out for that lie.

 

[ddferrari]

For daily use as a gamer, surfer and media watcher, I think my Gen 3 NVMEs and 32GB DDR4 (along with occasional GPU upgrades) are going to take me several years into the future. I'll upgrade when my i7-9700K really starts showing it's age and I need a new mobo to boot... no pun intended.

 

[erickmendes]

Taking away the extreme heat, high prices, high power consumption, the need for cooling, gen 5 has delivered nothing to improve real world experience even compared to Gen 3 drives. Unless all you do all day is large sequential file transfers, they are an utter waste of time, effort and money. They have barely moved the bar on random transfers but somehow quote massive random IOPs far better than Optane, yet perform far worse. Yet to see a single tech site call them out for that lie.

Agree... I think Gen 5 will only pick up when paired with 8TB even with more conservative speeds like 7500MB/S at a nice price point.

 

[RandomWAN]

It all depends on what drive you're getting. If you're jumping from top-tier to top-tier generationally, there is a noticable difference. I went from a Samsung Pro series 3rd gen to a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus (4th gen) and the performance difference is noticable. It's not going to be the night and day difference between a SATA3 and an NVME, but I can tell the difference.

The 5th gen will be a noticable uptick, especially over anything older than 4th gen, but you definitely need additional cooling beyond the built-in heatsinks and it will limit your motherboard options somewhat. Depending on what cooling option you go with for it, clearances will become a concern as the 5th gen slots are generally right above the GPU and will be sandwiched between your GPU and whatever your CPU cooling solution is.

 

[PEnnn]

The insanity continues.

 

[Bruno M. Villar]

Eeeeeeeeewwwwwww

 

[zamroni111]

It's time for desktop PC manufacturers to put e1.s slot to replace m.2

https://www.storagereview.com/news/ruler-is-finally-going-mainstream-why-e1-s-ssds-are-taking-over

 

[loki1944]

It all depends on what drive you're getting. If you're jumping from top-tier to top-tier generationally, there is a noticable difference. I went from a Samsung Pro series 3rd gen to a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus (4th gen) and the performance difference is noticable. It's not going to be the night and day difference between a SATA3 and an NVME, but I can tell the difference.

The 5th gen will be a noticable uptick, especially over anything older than 4th gen, but you definitely need additional cooling beyond the built-in heatsinks and it will limit your motherboard options somewhat. Depending on what cooling option you go with for it, clearances will become a concern as the 5th gen slots are generally right above the GPU and will be sandwiched between your GPU and whatever your CPU cooling solution is.

depends on what you are using it for; for non-professional tasks it's not much benefit; for games SATA II SSDs are still fine for the most demanding ones like Starfield and regular 7.2k HDDare still plenty for the other 99%.

 

[Atmajaya2020]

Gain heat to gain speed..
can't imagine when paired with a hot CPU and GPU..

 

[RandomWAN]

depends on what you are using it for; for non-professional tasks it's not much benefit; for games SATA II SSDs are still fine for the most demanding ones like Starfield and regular 7.2k HDDare still plenty for the other 99%.

SATA3 is funtional for gaming, but NVME cuts down on load times by a lot. HDD are not what I would call functional for modern OS. Windows 10/11 often suffer big latency, especially on boot as the HDD access is maxxed out. This shows up in even basic productivity workstations. With as affordable as SSDs are, I wouldn't ever recommend an HDD for anything other than large storage in a NAS and even then I'd personally want an SSD/NVME buffer to speed up the data transfers.

 

[CMP01]

First thoughts: Great... but that's never fitting in behind, over or under my 7900XTX.

Tbh when the expected CPU upgrade comes (this year: 5800X to 7800X3D unless something else happens first) I'll most likely only be going for a Crucial T700 or like for the main drive and swapping my plethora of 990 and 980 Pro's over as they're fast enough for the gaming.

 

[ZedRM]

This is completely stupid! This crazy setup wouldn't fit on my board because the NVMe slot is directly under the GPU. MSI didn't really think about this to well before making it.