INTRODUCTION

   Even though according to several industry reports NAND flash price are set to rise later in 2020 at least at the time i type these lines SSD's have never been cheaper and that includes both SATA and PCIe models. Yes, it will be long before SSDs can finally catch up to regular HDDs when it comes to capacity (and more importantly reach their price/capacity ratio) but with performance numbers surpassing even 4000MB/s (for PCIe 4.0 models) most consumers place capacity second. Of course, as expected the mid-end M.2 NVMe drives are driving the market in terms of sales and so most manufacturers have been keeping their focus in the development and production of such models one of which is the latest P34A60 by Silicon Power which is here with us today.

   Founded in 2003 by a group of enthusiastic data storage industry experts, Silicon Power is committed to delivering outstanding product and service quality. Headquartered and with our own state-of-the-art production site in Taipei, we have become a leading manufacturer of flash memory cards, USB flash drives, portable hard drives, solid state drives, DRAM modules and industrial-grade products. As an international player with four branch offices around the globe, we continuously strive to offer the perfect data storage solution for all requirements of modern digitalized life. With a strong focus on combining innovative technology and award-winning design, we live up to our brand promise to reliably preserve and protect your most valuable data. Because memory is personal.

   The P34A60 line of M.2 2280 PCIe SSDs by Silicon Power is currently available in 256GB/512GB/1TB/2TB capacities and is based on the DRAM-less SM2263XT 4-channel high-performance PCIe Gen3 x4 NAND flash controller which they've paired with 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND Flash memory by Micron. Just like the Helix-L model by Mushkin the P34A60 also supports the Host Memory Buffer (HMB) architecture which makes up for the lack of DRAM by using the memory of your PC to cache mapping tables (remember that this feature is only supported on versions of Windows 10 launched from 2019 and beyond). In the case of the P34A60 this enables the SM2263XT controller to achieve performance numbers of up to 2200MB/s in reads and 1600MB/s in writes thus rivalling controllers with their very own DRAM modules. Of course, the SM2263XT controller also supports various technologies like Silicon Motion's NANDXtend error-correcting code (ECC) with SRAM ECC, end to end data path protection, global wear-levelling, real time AES 256-bit encryption, SHA 256, TRNG, TCG Opal and IEEE-1667 (Microsoft's eDrive). Finally, Silicon Power reports a general MTBF of 2.000.000 hours for the entire P34A60 line and covers it with a 5 year warranty.