MSI 500GB SSD PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2

The MSI SPATIUM M450 is a budget SSD with great endurance and a 5-year warranty, but its PCIe 4.0 label is misleading. Real-world speeds are closer to a good PCIe 3.0 drive. Worth buying only if you find it cheap and don't need top-tier performance.

Sequential reads top out at 3600 MB/s and writes at 2300 MB/s. That's fine, but it's not what most people expect from PCIe 4.0. Random performance is actually the bright spot here, landing in the 85th percentile of our database. The 550K random write IOPS is solid for a DRAM-less drive. But the speed score overall sits at the 60th percentile, which means it's middle of the pack. The endurance story is much better, 600 TBW puts it in the 95th percentile, so this drive should outlast most of its peers. Just don't expect it to win any benchmark races.

Against the Crucial T500, Samsung 990 EVO, or XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade, the M450 gets left in the dust on sequential speeds. Those drives push 5000 to 7000 MB/s reads, while the M450 sits at 3600. The Corsair MP700 Elite is in another league entirely. Where the M450 fights back is endurance and warranty. 600 TBW beats many competitors at this price point. But if you actually want PCIe 4.0 performance, the Crucial T500 or Samsung 990 EVO are the obvious upgrades. The M450 is more of a budget stopgap than a true Gen4 contender.

Pricing is all over the place depending on where you look. One US listing shows $108, while a French listing shows 109 EUR. For a 500GB drive, that's not exactly a steal when you can often find 1TB Gen4 drives for not much more. The value proposition hinges on the warranty and endurance. If you catch it on sale, it's a reasonable budget pick. At full price, you're paying for the MSI name and a heatsink picture, as one reviewer put it.

The MSI SPATIUM M450 is a budget PCIe 4.0 drive that mostly behaves like a decent PCIe 3.0 one. It's got a Phison E19T controller, TLC NAND, and no DRAM cache, which tells you a lot before you even install it. The 500GB capacity is on the small side these days, but for a boot drive or a secondary game library, it gets the job done.

MSI backs it with a 5-year warranty and a 600 TBW endurance rating, which is genuinely impressive for a drive in this class. The problem is the marketing. It says PCIe 4.0 on the box, but the 3600 MB/s read and 2300 MB/s write speeds are entry-level Gen4 numbers at best. Several owners have called this out, and our data backs them up.

Skip this if you need real PCIe 4.0 speeds for video editing, large file transfers, or DirectStorage gaming. The sequential performance just isn't there. Also skip it if you need more than 500GB, because the capacity score lands in the 27th percentile of our database. And if you've been burned by drive failures before, the mixed reliability reports might make you nervous.

This drive makes sense for someone building a budget system or upgrading an older laptop that just needs a reliable boot drive. The 5-year warranty and high endurance rating mean it should last. But if you're chasing PCIe 4.0 speeds, this isn't the drive for you. It's a solid PCIe 3.0 performer wearing a Gen4 badge. Buy it for reliability and warranty, not for speed.