This week, we got our first opportunity to benchmark a PCIe 5.0 SSD, but that was an engineering sample based on Phison's E26 controller, not a shipping product that consumers will be able to buy. Today, MSI has announced two new, PCIe 5.0 SSDs -- the Spatium M570 Pro and Spatium M570 -- which are the first PCIe 5.0 drives we've seen that you will actually be able to buy as shipping products.
At MSI's CES demo suite, we got to see both drives, but more importantly, we got to see early benchmark results from the Spatium M570 Pro, which boasts sequential read and write speeds of 12,000 and 10,000 MBps respectively. MSI is launching both drives in Q2 of this year for undisclosed prices and the M570 Pro is also going to be available as an option in its Raider GE78 HX and Titan GT77 HX laptops.
Both MSI Spatium drives use Phison's E26 controller, but the M570 Pro will use Micron's new 232-layer NAND flash that runs at 2,400 MHz, allowing it to have faster speeds while the M570 non-pro is using slower 1,600 MHz memory that only allows it to get up to 10,000 MBps reads. Because the 2,400 MHz flash isn't available in significant quantities yet, we won't see the Pro until Q3 of 2023. Meanwhile, the non-Pro will launch in Q1.
The drives will be available in 1, 2 and 4TB capacities that come both with and without heatsinks. The units we saw on display had beautiful heatsinks emblazoned with MSI's logo on them. The heatsink on the M570 Pro is finned with a vapor chamber plate and a geometric shroud that has reddish-gold paint. The M570 regular has an aluminum heatsink with stacked fins and bronze coloring.
At MSI's suite, we got to see two different sets of CrystalDiskMark results for a 2TB Spatium M570 Pro, one taken on a custom-built MSI desktop and another on a Raider GE78 HX laptop. The desktop had a Ryzen 9 7950X CPU, an MSI MPG X670E Carbon EK X D-RGB motherboard, an EK waterblock, RTX 4090 graphics and 32GB of DDR5 RAM.
As you can see in the image above, the 2TB M570 Pro returned the following results on the custom desktop.
| Test | Read (MBps) | Write (MBps) |
|---|---|---|
| SEQ 1M Q8T1 | 12,342.11 | 11,814.84 |
| SEQ 128K Q32T1 | 12,220.23 | 11,813.43 |
| RND 4K Q32T16 | 5,777.33 | 5,209 |
| RND 4K Q1T1 | 76.29 | 252.59 |
On the Raider laptop, those numbers were just a little lower, with the top line sequential read / write hitting 12,301.11 and 8,972.83. Clearly, having a full-power desktop with good cooling goes a long way.
The numbers from the MSI Spatium M570 Pro simply blow away the speeds we see on the best SSDs today, including Samsung's 990 Pro, which is rated for just 7,450 MBps reads and 6,900 MBps writes.
Will you benefit from all of that speed? A PCIe 5.0 SSD like the Spatium M570 Pro probably won't help you open Chrome browser much faster, but when Microsoft's DirectStorage becomes widely adopted, it will take advantage of the added bandwidth to make your games faster, perhaps even eliminating the time you spend waiting for the next level to load.
