INTRODUCTION

   Picking the right "tools" for the job requires knowing exactly what you'll use them with and what for. The same applies with pretty much everything in the computer industry so picking the right parts always has to do with what your needs are and of course how well they can all work together. Take the new PCIe 4.0 motherboards for example, some of them come with support for Gen 4x4 M.2 NVMe drives while others do not so it goes to reason that you should pair the former with Gen 4x4 M.2 NVMe SSDs. Now there aren't that many 4.0 models in the market today but after reviewing the very good US70 1TB model by Silicon Power some of you asked if i could also test the 2TB capacity one to see how it performs and that's exactly what I’ve been doing for the past 2 weeks.

   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.

   Just like with the 1TB capacity model the 2TB variant of the US70 M.2 Gen 4x4 NVMe SSD is also 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 1GB DDR4 SDRAM modules. Once again, 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 together with a TBW (terabytes written) of 3600.