Gen 5 drives are slowly taking over our best SSD list, but one thing’s apparent: they run a little toasty. Sure, a chonky cooler isn’t necessary in some cases, but it helps keep those lofty temperatures at bay to prevent thermal throttling. MSI’s latest solution is a vapour chamber that uses the power of vapourisation and condensation to ensure your M.2 keeps a cool head.
This isn’t any old implementation, though. According to the brand, it’s the “world’s first non-metal vapour chamber thermal solution for SSDs.” The method dissipates heat through a two-phase flow transition of gas and liquid. There should be minimal signal interference, ensuring rapid and silent heat exchange for efficient data transfers in a lightweight design.
All in all, MSI promises the heatsink will shave “up to 11°C” off your usual temperatures on an identical drive without the cooler. For reference, it sits atop a Spatium M560 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 on the Computex show floor, which contains a Phison E13T 7nm DRAM-less controller known for its efficiency and blazing transfer rates up to 10GB/s in 1TB and 2TB capacities. Eventually, the cooling solution should be available for other models in the future.
My favourite part of the Spatium Vapor Chamber SSD cooler is its transparency. You can see all the inner workings, including the liquid silently bubbling away and condensing on the sides. I’ve had a soft spot for this aesthetic ever since I got my hands on a see-through Game Boy back in the 90s, and I praise nearly every clear case I come across, so I might be a little biased.
Portable solutions
MSI has been nothing short of a busy bee at Computex, introducing portable storage solutions as well as internal. Datamag stands out as one of the more intriguing options, solving an issue I’ve long had with external drives: their dangly bits.
Hear me out; there’s nothing more irritating than wanting to plug a portable SSD into your laptop or smartphone but having no room to rest it. This either leaves it hanging and puts pressure on the USB slot or you must squeeze it above your keyboard, making typing uncomfortable. Using magnets, Datamag attaches to your device’s outer shell. Bish, bash, bosh; problem solved. It more than likely won’t slip off given the strength of the magnet, but the drive is well-protected with an aluminium alloy case in the rare event it does.
Datamag comes in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities and connects to your device using USB 4.0 for 40Gb/s transfer speeds or USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 for 2Gbps. Either is ideal for high-quality 4K60 video editing and works with ProRes on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max handsets.
With plenty more to feast your eyes on at the event, MSI also debuted new golden power supplies, screen-clad AIO coolers, a huge touchscreen AI PC, portable AI laptops, an AI monitor that has us debating whether or not it’s cheating, and a new MSI Claw 8 AI gaming handheld. It even asked a large language model to create a graphics card, and it looks incredible.
