INTRODUCTION

   Even though we're all eagerly awaiting the arrival/unveiling of the next-gen PCIe 5.0 motherboards PCIe 4.0 is still a very interesting subject especially when NAND controller and flash manufacturers keep improving both performance and durability. This last year alone for example Phison has further improved its PCIe 4.0 NAND flash controllers (with the E18 being their best consumer oriented model to date) whereas Micron has introduced new 3D TLC NAND flash (176-layer) with better performance and endurance numbers (not to mention capable of higher storage capacities). Both these technological leaps have led to the introduction of numerous new M.2 NVMe v1.4 solid state drives in the market such as the XS70 model by Silicon Power which i have here with me 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.

   Silicon Power currently has 3 capacities in their new XS70 line of M.2 PCIe 4.0 (Gen4) M.2 NVMe SSDs (1/2/4TB) all of which feature a thick aluminum heatsink that surrounds the entire PCB for optimal heat dissipation (today I’ll be testing the 1TB variant - 2TB variant review soon). As with many other models the XS70 line is based on the award winning 8-channel tri-core (32-bit ARM Cortex R5 CPUs) PS5018-E18 NVMe v1.4 compatible NAND flash controller by PHISON which Silicon Power has paired with Micron’s latest 512Gb 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash (B47R) together with DDR4 2666MHz SDRAM by Samsung (1GB for the 1TB model). This hardware marriage pushes the maximum performance of the XS70 line up to 7300MB/s in reads and 6800MB/s in writes (should be around 7000-5500MB/s for the 1TB model). Once again, the PS5018-E18 NAND flash controller sits at the top in terms of performance currently and sports numerous features like PHISON's 4th Gen LDPC engine (low-density parity check) along with end-to-end data path protection, advanced wear leveling, thermal throttling (70 degrees Celsius limit), TRIM, SMART, bad block management, dynamic range SLC cache and SmartECC (RAID ECC). Finally, Silicon Power covers the entire line with a 5-year limited warranty and as for endurance numbers they report an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 1.6 million hours for the entire XS70 line and a TBW (Terabytes Written) of 700 for the 1TB model, 1400 for the 2TB model and 3000 for the 4TB model.