Silicon Power UD90, M.2

The Silicon Power UD90 is the first SSD that we test that's built using Phison's new E21 controller, designed as a modern replacement to the E19 that powered drives such as the MSI Spatium M450 and WD SN750SE. While the E19 was PCIe 4.0 too, the E21 is an upgraded design built on a 12 nanometer production process at TSMC, definitely improving heat output and thermals. For NAND flash, Silicon Power opted for the highly-popular Micron 176-layer 3D TLC—can't go wrong with that. As expected, for cost reasons, a DRAM cache is not included, but the E21 controller is especially optimized for DRAM-less operation.

The Phison E21 controller paired with Micron’s 176-layer TLC NAND does result in a good mainstream drive in terms of performance, even surpassing Silicon Power rated speeds, which operates at decent temperatures in normal operation. However, if your projects do imply writing very large sequences of data at once, the drive will heat up to about 80 degrees Celsius while using the stock thin graphene heatspreader. In that case, we will surely recommend a custom heatsink or simply installing the drive on a motherboard with an integrated cooling system.

The Silicon Power UD90 1TB NVMe SSD delivers a perfect mix of high performance and high quality at a low price. I’m sure that anyone who decides to buy this SSD, will be more than satisfied. Especially when we expect the specified performance but actually receive much more. Funky Kit highly recommends the Silicon Power UD90 1TB NVMe M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD!

The UD90 is another entry-level PCI-E 4.0 drive from Silicon Power, which includes a good amount of pSLC cache in order to minimize de disadvantages of the QLC NAND packages. After the cache has been completely used up, the speed will drop significantly, between 110MB/s and 160MB/s, which is quite close to regular HDDs. Compatibility is assured with plenty of devices thanks to the 2280 format, and we noted that the rated TBW rating for a similar configuration is of 450TB.

We review the Silicon Power UD90 1TB NVMe SSD that comes in a M.2 2230 form factor and offers performance on-par with more expensive options.

The UD90 2TB M.2 2230 NVMe SSD by Silicon Power may not be among the fastest PCIe 4.0 Gen4 models out there (although it did surpass most in HD Tune Pro and HD Tach RW) but it doesn’t really have to be since currently available gaming handhelds use the PCIe 3.0 interface. So, performance for a Gen3 interface is actually very good and should satisfy even the most demanding of users. Durability might not be the greatest since we're talking about QLC NAND flash but i seriously doubt this would pose an issue for handheld use (even if it did it would be years until that happens). Unfortunately, due to current technology limitations squeezing 4TB on a single sided M.2 2230 SSD (double sided wouldn’t be compatible with some handhelds) might take a while and well, it is what it is.