MSI Spatium M570 SSD review: A decent drive that can’t quite match up to its peers

The first generation of PCIe 5.0 SSDs is finally upon us, and what started as a trickle of drives earlier this year has quickly become a flood. Tons of companies are attempting to make the best M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSDs for consumers, and while MSI is a relative newcomer to SSDs, that hasn’t stopped the company from launching the Spatium M570. The M570 is a definite upgrade over PCIe 4.0 SSDs, but it’s not quite the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD you can buy.

Source: MSI

 

MSI Spatium M570 PCIe 5.0 NVMe

A good PCIe 5.0 SSD

$290 $350 Save $60

The MSI Spatium M570 is a PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD with an eye-catching heatsink. It only comes in a 2TB capacity, and it’s not the fastest drive around, but it’s solid for what it is.

Storage capacity

1TB, 2TB

Hardware Interface

PCIe Gen 5 x4

Transfer rate

10,000/10,000MB/s Read/Write

TBW

1,400

Price

$290

Pros

• Much faster than even the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs
• Included heatsink
• 2TB of storage

Cons

• No 1TB or 4TB models
• Not quite the fastest PCIe 5.0 drive

MSI Spatium M570: Pricing and availability

While most SSDs offer at least a couple different sizes, only the 2TB M570 is available for purchase. MSI’s website says there’s a 1TB model out there, but so far, it hasn’t hit store shelves, even though the M570 has been out for months now. At the time of writing, it seems the 2TB model has a de facto MSRP of $290, as it’s been going for that price for several weeks on Amazon and Newegg. Additionally, the M570 always comes with a heatsink; there is no heatsinkless version like you might find with other PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 SSDs.

How the MSI Spatium M570 was tested

My test platform for this review uses Asus’s B650E-I Strix, a Ryzen 9 7900X, and G.Skill’s 32GB Flare X5 DDR5 RAM running at 6,000MHz and CL36. While this motherboard (and virtually every other motherboard that supports PCIe 5.0 drives) comes with a motherboard heatsink, I opted to use the M570’s included heatsink, mostly because that’s how most people would use it and also because it really didn’t seem like it was supposed to come off. A warranty sticker is placed on top of one of the screws you’d need to remove, and that implies MSI doesn’t want you messing with it.

In order to test the M570 and other drives as accurately as possible, the following benchmarks were run twice: once for near 0% capacity filled and again for about 90% filled. Additionally, these benchmarks were not run back to back but with 10 to 15-minute gaps in between to let the SSD cache refill so that the results would show the best-case performance. However, in a longer, sustained benchmark or workload (which weren’t looked at here), you should expect to see performance drop over time on any SSD.

While we have reviewed Crucial’s T700 PCIe 5.0 SSD, I don’t personally have it for my own testing, so I won’t be including its data here. Although you can cross-reference this review with the T700 review, I wouldn’t recommend it since the testing platforms and methodologies were different, so the results aren’t exactly apples-to-apples. I have included fresh benchmarks of Samsung’s 990 Pro, however, which stands as the fastest — or one of the fastest — PCIe 4.0 SSDs to date. Like with the T700, the 990 Pro review used a different methodology, so the numbers will be slightly different compared to my latest data.

Performance

Just slightly pushing what PCIe 5.0 can do for SSDs

The first test I put my SSDs through was CrystalDiskMark, which is a very flexible and customizable storage benchmark. For this review, I tested the six default tests under the “default” and “NVME” preloaded profiles.

Scores are organized by read/write and are measured in MB/s.

With only a few gigabytes filled in, the M570 beats the 990 Pro in pretty much every benchmark, whether it’s sequential or random. But with each drive filled up to 90%, the M570 slips in the random, high queue depth, high thread count write benchmark, which is the only instance of the 990 Pro beating the M570. I’m actually quite impressed with the M570’s random performance overall, though, since PCIe 5.0 doesn’t help with it and also because the 990 Pro is an excellent drive when it comes to random performance.

The other benchmark is the ATTO Disk Benchmark, which was run in its default configuration: queue depth set to 4, file size at 256MB, and tested from 512 bytes to 64MB. Because Atto gives you an almost excessive amount of data points, not every step from 512 bytes to 64MB will be shown here since I don’t want the important parts to get lost under all this data.

Scores are organized by read/write and are measured in MB/s.

The point of ATTO is to show you not only how fast these drives get when data block sizes get larger but also to demonstrate how consistent they are, and consistency can be challenging when an SSD is filled to near capacity. While the 990 Pro is extremely consistent even when filled to 90%, the M570 falls just a little short. The graph doesn’t quite capture how the M570 is slightly inconsistent since every other point isn’t shown, but at 8MB, you can see that the write speeds are a little lower than you’d expect. At 4MB, write performance dipped to 7,450MB/s and even hit a low of 1,001MB/s at 24MB. Reads were also a little inconsistent, though not greatly.

Even though this isn’t a total blowout, and the 990 Pro is certainly a very consistent and high performer even when filled to 90% capacity, the M570 is undeniably the faster drive. In real-world scenarios, you’d see the M570 pull ahead in large file transfers in the tens or hundreds of gigabytes. For stuff like gaming and everyday tasks, though, don’t expect the M570 to be a game changer, as random workloads are more important. In that respect, the M570 is top-tier, but not by a wide margin.

When it comes to thermals, the M570 peaked at 81 degrees Celsius across all tests, which is what the 990 Pro would hit without a heatsink. That’s acceptable, although on the high side, for an SSD. However, the M570 does require a pretty large heatsink in order to hit the temperature it does. If you’re concerned about PCIe 5.0 SSDs getting hot, you don’t need to worry here.

Should you buy the MSI Spatium M570?

You should buy the MSI Spatium M570 if:

• You want a large, high-performance SSD
• You have PCIe 5.0 compatibility on your motherboard
• You transfer lots of big files frequently

You shouldn’t buy the MSI Spatium M570 if:

• You want the absolute fastest SSD rather than one of the fastest
• You don’t have PCIe 5.0 compatibility on your motherboard
• You’re mostly just gaming or doing basic tasks, and not regularly doing large file transfers

For a first-generation product, MSI’s done a decent job. The Spatium M570 is by no means an amazing SSD, but it’s decent enough and will be right at home in any high-end PC. I would have liked to see a heatsinkless model for people who plan on using the ones that come with motherboards, and the lack of availability for other storage capacities is also disappointing. Still, it’s a good SSD overall, and if I was in the market for a PCIe 5.0 SSD, I’d consider it.

However, the M570 doesn’t exist in a bubble and has lots of competitors. There’s the T700, which is actually a little cheaper and is a higher-performance drive, as it can hit 12,000MB/s in sequential workloads. With the T700 around, it’s not clear why you’d get the M570. Hopefully, the M570 gets a price drop, or it could at least be useful as a substitute if the T700 is ever in short supply. At least when it comes to raw performance, MSI’s upcoming Spatium M570 Pro will be a significant improvement, with speeds of 12,000MB/s to 14,000MB/s. But for now, the M570 will have to settle for being a good PCIe 5.0 SSD rather than one of the best.

Source: MSI

 

MSI Spatium M570 PCIe 5.0 NVMe

A decent PCIe 5.0 SSD

$290 $350 Save $60

The MSI Spatium M570 is a PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD with an eye-catching heatsink. It only comes in a 2TB capacity, and it’s not the fastest drive around, but it’s solid for what it is.