It was almost exactly two years ago when a very wise man wrote, "Next-Gen PCIe 5.0 SSDs to Run Hot, May Require Cooling." We're not sure where that wise man is now, but his prophetic words have been realized with the new MSI Spatium M580 Frozr SSD. [Okay, we get the point, Josh. -Ed.] This next-gen storage device is pushing the limits of the PCIe Gen 5 interface and what is expected from an SSD cooler, as it includes a massive cooling tower to help keep its temps down.
The drive's top-line specs include some scintillating numbers: 14.6GB/s for sequential read speeds and 12.7GB/s for sequential writes. Those numbers are for the 2TB version, which is the fastest of the three capacities offered (1TB and 4TB are also available). The drive uses Phison's E26 controller, which has been found on many Gen 5 SSDs thus far. However, MSI's SSD is pushing it about as close to the maximum possible throughput on this interface. As HotHardware notes, the peak throughput using four PCIe 5 lanes is 15.75GB/s. But once overhead is accounted for, you'll end up somewhere close to the Spatium's numbers.
The cooler is also a novel piece of gear, as MSI has chosen the passive cooling route instead of a smaller cooler with a fan. This towering aluminum heatsink comes pre-mounted to the SSD, which is an interesting feature, and the company's announcement says it drops temps by a whopping 20C. MSI says the cooler features three heat pipes, and the number of fins provided is "a plethora." It will surely jut out a few inches from your M2 slot, but it shouldn't interfere with your CPU or GPU.
Overall, we must say we approve of MSI's approach. We'll take a silent cooler any day over a noisy one with a fan, and the size of it makes us like it more. It'll be awash in warm air rising from the GPU, given its location, but there's nothing you can do about that. It does appear to confirm our previous speculation that these super-fast Gen 5 SSDs will require some kind of cooling to maintain their maximum throughput, as opposed to the naked drives we've been using thus far.
