INTRODUCTION

   With read and write performance levels all the way up to 7000MB/s M.2 PCIe Gen 4x4 Rev.2 NVMe solid state drives may currently hold the title of the fastest ones in the market but since less than 1% of PC users out there actually has a Gen 4x4 compatible motherboard Gen 3x4 models are still by far the most popular ones. So the fact that most manufacturers still focus the majority (if not the entirety) of their resources into the development and manufacture of M.2 PCIe Gen 3x4 NVMe SSDs is really not a surprise. Among those manufacturers is none other than Silicon Power and after their very successful UD70 (review here) line of M.2 Gen 3x4 NVMe SSDs they just released yet another one, the XPower XD80.

   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 brand new XPower XD80 line of M.2 Gen 3x4 NVMe SSDs is currently available in 256GB/512GB/1TB/2TB capacities (i have the 2TB variant with me today) and just like previous models it's based on the E12S high performance controller by Phison (PS5012-E12S / Gen3x4 NVMe 1.3 interface) which Silicon Power has paired with Toshiba 96-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND flash and 512MB DDR3L SDRAM by UnilC, a combination which allows the drive to reach 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, is Toggle 3.0 & ONFi 4.0 compliant and packs several technologies aimed at both high performance and reliability including StrongECC, SmartRefresh, SmartFlush, end-to-end data protection, thermal monitoring, AES-256 encryption, SLC caching and TCG Pyrite/OPAL support. As for endurance Silicon Power reports an MTTF (mean time to failure) of 2 million hours and as expected covers the entire XD80 line with a limited 5-year warranty.