MSI Reveals Spatium M570 PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD: Up to 12.3 GB/s

UPDATE: MSI has now shown the MSI Spatium M570 Pro and M570 at CES.

MSI on Thursday announced its latest solid-state drive, this time with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface designed for AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7000 and Intel's 12th and 13th Generation Core platforms. The Spatium M570 PCIe Gen5 M.2-2280 SSD offers the maximum performance enabled by Phison's E26 platform and will come in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB configuration. 

MSI's Spatium M570 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 HS is based on the Phison PS5026-E26 controller paired with 3D TLC NAND memory, possibly with a 2400 MT/s interface from an undisclosed vendor. We would speculate that this is Micron. However, it does not look like Micron will mass produce such memory this fall (at least not in high volumes), so drives with ~12.4/10 GB/s sequential read/write speeds could be several months off. The drive demonstrated by MSI offers a sequential read speed of up to 12,351 MB/s, a sequential write speed of up to 10,119 MB/s, a 1.3 million 4K random read IOPS (Q32T16), and up to 1.16 million 4K random write IOPS (Q32T16), which is significantly higher when compared to the best SSDs available today.

MSI specifically notes that its upcoming ultra-high-end MEG Godlike and MEC Ace motherboards will come bundled with its M.2 Xpander-Z Gen5 Dual adapter that can house two PCIe Gen5 drives and therefore offer around 70% higher transfer speeds in RAID 0 configurations when compared to a single drive, according to a press release published by TechPowerUp. 

MSI did not reveal when it plans to start selling its Spatium M570 SSD and this might be the most important part of the announcement. As we know, some of the upcoming SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface based on Phison's PS-5026-E26 controller are constrained by the 3D NAND memory they use and can only hit around 10 GB/s sequential read speed, which is significantly higher than ~7 GB/s offered by drives with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, but lower than ~12.4 GB/s demonstrated by Phison using drives powered by Micron's 232-layer memory with a 2400 MT/s interface speed. 

Since we do not know when MSI's Spatium M570 products are set to hit the market, it is probably not good business to speculate about their prices, but they will naturally carry a premium for high performance.