Silicon Power US70 1TB, M.2 2280 / M-Key / PCIe 4.0 x4

US70 is a product that manages to impress. Surely to get the best out of it you'll need a PCIe Gen 4 infrastructure and at the time of writing that means a compatible Ryzen processor on say a B550 or X570 chipset-based platform. In 2021 Intel will start with PCIe gen 4.0 as well. The unit shatters records given the right conditions, and for the rest of them on some workloads, you are down to high-end class TLC NVMe performance. And there is an abundance of choices available these days. Prices in USD are $189 and $379 respectively for the 1TB and 2 TB models. The warranty is a really proper five years, that or the TBW value reached. Whichever one is first. The 1800 TBW (1.8 PBW) value for the 1 TB model is downright superb. I like to close with this line, while top sequential and sustained benchmark figures are incredibly fun to look at and nearly eye-popping with this SSD, it's the overall real-world performance that I care about. And in that respect, we expected to see a bit more perf overall in our trace tests and that is the honest truth. It, however, is amazing to see where prices and performance are now compared to what you got in performance and money a few years ago. At just under 20 cents per GB what a powerful M2 NVME SSD this is, definitely, even highly recommended.

Silicon Power US70 1TB SSD is precisely what demanding users need. It combines everything that is important in an SSD and delivers impressive performance, at a reasonable price. It’s a must-have SSD for all those want the best.

Our first look at PCI-Express 4.0 NVMe SSD technology leaves us feeling excited. By harnessing the raw potential of Phison’s PS5016-E16-32 controller, the US70 boasts truly impressive performance numbers for synthetic benchmarks and easily defeated our top-tier PCI-Express 3.0 drives. To protect your data, and keep it running safely for years to come, the drive includes the latest features such as bad block management, over-provisioning, and SLC caching with DRAM cache buffer. The US70 has an impressive TBW value of 1,800 TB, so you won’t need to worry about long-term endurance. Silicon Power chose to omit a costly heat sink and therefore reduce costs. We feel this is a wise decision because most buyers would likely opt to use the motherboard’s integrated heat sink for a seamless look and installation.

The Silicon Power US70 is an excellent choice for the gamer, overclocker or creative professional looking for a fast, yet affordable, PCIe 4.0 SSD for their desktop computer. This compact, M.2 form factor drive is powered by Phison's PS5016-E16 controller and is available with up to 2TB of 3D TLC NAND flash. Combine this with an SLC cache, DRAM cache buffer and a PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe 1.3 interface and you have a drive capable of reading and writing at speeds well beyond that of the fastest PCIe 3.0 SSDs. In our sequential read and write tests, the 1TB version of the US70 was able to read at speeds as high as 5,009 MB/s and write at speeds in excess of 4,275 MB/s. The drive also did reasonably well in our random write tests. While it lagged behind some of the drives at low queue depths, it handled heavier workloads like a champ, topping out at a little more than 439,000 IOPS.

The Silicon Power US70 delivers the best bang for the buck when it comes to PCIe Gen4x4 drives at this point in time!