MSI today announced the MSI Spatium M580 Frozr an NVMe drive with a bulky attached air cooler rated to achieve speeds as high as 14.6 GB/s. The tall heatsink includes three heatpipes, but no fans, making this by far the largest passive SSD cooler we've ever seen.
According to an MSI blog post e that massive air cooler reduces operating temperatures by up to 20 degrees Celsius by leveraging its heatpipes and aluminum fins. If the performance numbers of 14.6 GB/s read speeds and 12.7 GB/s write speeds provided by MSI are true, it makes sense that the new fastest SSDs on the market would need some extra cooling headroom.
The Spatium M580 Frozr is detailed as using a DRAM cache buffer and an SLC cache to help keep speeds high and latencies low. There's even a focus on system monitoring and data backup software through an Actiphy partnership, and built-in support for LPDC ECC and E2E Data Protection. Most importantly, the drive is covered by a 5-Year Warranty like other top NVMe options are.
But now that we've covered the main details of the MSI Spatium M580 Frozr, we should take a moment to talk about SSD market conditions here in Q1 2024.
The current fastest NVMe SSD is the Crucial T705, which is rated for up to 14.5 GB/s writes and 12.7 GB/s reads. (It's included in our list of the best SSDs for a reason.) Provided the MSI Spatium M580 Frozr can meet the performance numbers that MSI is advertising with their debut blog post, it seems that the T705 could have some competition on our testbed.
That said, the Crucial T705 still has a much more manageably-sized heatsink than this MSI Spatium M580 Frozr.
Is such an upsized cooler really worth what may end up being an only marginal bump in performance? At least for a practically-minded PC gamer, it's a questionable choice: even the most brutal-on-SSD games these days aren't exceeding 3 GB/s, yet. Other pro workloads more strictly bound by high NVMe throughput may see more value in that trade-off, though.
Unfortunately, while the original MSI blog post links to a page for this new Spatium M580 NVMe drive, that page produces a 404 error as of this writing. Additionally, no pricing or release date information was provided, though the phrasing seemed to imply an imminent release.
