INTRODUCTION

   Even though it took 2.5" SATA solid state drives roughly 8 years to establish themselves as the go to storage for high performance it took less than 2 years for M.2 NVMe SSD models to become just as popular, if not more. Yes, to date they may not enjoy the same compatibility levels as 2.5" SATA models with older systems but for pretty much every system (motherboard) released since 2018 their impressive read and write numbers are without match, not currently anyways. On top of that add the fact that SSD prices have dropped considerably over the last few months and it's very easy to understand why these drives enjoy such high popularity levels among enthusiasts, gamers and professionals alike. The UD70 is the latest high-end M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen3x4 model by Silicon Power and today I’ll be testing the 2TB variant.

   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 UD70 M.2 NVMe SSD is currently available in 500GB/1TB/2TB capacities and is based on the rather popular E12 high performance controller by Phison (PS5012-E12S / Gen3x4 NVMe 1.3 interface) which Silicon Power has paired with Micron's 96-layer QLC NAND flash and 2GB DDR3L 1866MHz SDRAM by Kingston allowing the drive to hit read and write numbers of 3400MB/s and 3000MB/s respectively. The Phison PS5012-E12S controller features a total of eight NAND channels with 32 CE targets, supports up to 8TB of NAND and packs several interesting technologies aimed at both high performance and reliability including SLC caching, StrongECC, SmartRefresh, SmartFlush, LDPC (low density parity check), end-to-end data protection, thermal monitoring, AES-256 encryption and TCG Pyrite/OPAL support. In terms of endurance Silicon Power reports an MTBF (meantime between failure) of 1.8 million hours and as for warranty once again they cover the UD70 line with a 5-year limited one.