INTRODUCTION

   Even though SATA based M.2 SSD models were just introduced into the market as a smaller form factor aimed towards use with compact laptops and didn't really offer any performance improvements over regular 2.5" models the introduction of the PCIe Gen 2 variants changed all that. Now consumers and professionals alike could have read and write performance levels surpassing 1500MB/s (3+ times compared to regular 2.5" models) from tiny drives primarily mounted on PCIe cards. The appearance of the Gen 3 NVMe standard further improved performance and yes system compatibility might have been an issue at first (you could still mount them on certain PCIe cards) but with read and write speeds going all the way up to 3500MB/s (on compatible mainboards) that didn't change anything. Fast forward to today and we now have Gen 4 models which according to manufacturers can hit and even surpass the 5000MB/s barrier and today with me i have one such drive, the US70 1TB by Silicon Power.

   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 its own state-of-the-art production site in Taipei, SP has become a leading manufacturer of flash memory cards, USB flash drives, portable hard drives, solid state drives, DRAM modules and industrial-grade products. Successfully blending innovative technology with award-winning design, the international player with four branch offices around the globe continuously strives for perfection in preserving and protecting your valuable data. Because memory is personal.

   The US70 line of M.2 Gen 4 NVMe SSDs currently includes just two capacities (1/2TB - review soon) and is based on Phison's PS5016-E16-32 NAND flash controller which Silicon Power has paired with BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash by Sandisk and two SKhynix 512MB DDR4 SDRAM modules. The PS5016-E16-32 is a dual-core (32-bit ARM Cortex R5 CPUs with CoXProcessor technology), 8-channel NVMe v1.3 NAND flash controller that features Phison's 4th Gen LDPC engine (low-density parity check) along with end-to-end data path protection, wear levelling, TRIM, bad block management, dynamic range SLC cache and SmartECC (RAID ECC) and fully supports AES-256bit hardware encryption and TCG Opal 2.0. Silicon Power covers the entire US70 line with a 5-year limited warranty and as for endurance they report 1.7 million hours for both capacities and a TBW (terabytes written) of 1800 for the 1TB version and 3600 for the 2TB version.