Silicon Power Joins the PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Party

(Image credit: Silicon Power)

If you've purchased yourself an AMD X570 or B550 motherboard along with an accompanying Ryzen 3000 CPU, it'd be a shame not to use its PCI-Express 4.0 storage capabilities. There aren't all that many options available yet, but now, Silicon Power is joining the fray with its new US70 M.2 SSD.

PCIe 4 NVMe SSDs boast truly absurd speeds. Whereas PCIe 3.0 SSDs capped out at about 3500 MB/s, the US70 is capable of read and write speeds of up to 5000 MB/s and 4400 MB/s, respectively. That's not fully saturating the PCIe 4.0 bandwidth yet, but for now, most affordable controllers simply haven't evolved to that point yet.

With built-in wear leveling, bad block management, over-provisioning, SLC caching, and TRIM commands it's up to speed with all the latest features one can expect from an SSD.

Capacities only include 1 TB and 2 TB models. The US70 features 3D NAND, although it's not exactly clear what kind of NAND is baked into it. Given that it uses SLC caching, it clearly isn't SLC NAND, so we're leaning towards TLC NAND as a cost/performance effective option. It's also not clear which controller this SSD uses.

The SSD doesn't come with a built-in heatsink, and given its speeds, we reckon this will be among the more affordable PCIe Gen 4 SSDs available. It will come with a 5-year warranty.

Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

  • Rdslw
    big: check
    fast: check
    cheap: maybe.
    lets see if it fry itself like the others, but looking at 5Y warranty I am optimistic.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Rdslw said:
    cheap: maybe.
    4.0 NVMe will become cheap in due time. It took 3-4 years for 3.0x4 SSDs to go from expensive novelty to price parity with SATA at least for more budget-friendly ~2GB/s models, 4.0x4 will likely be similar for bringing 4-6GB/s SSDs to the masses.
    Reply
  • Rdslw
    InvalidError said:
    4.0 NVMe will become cheap in due time. It took 3-4 years for 3.0x4 SSDs to go from expensive novelty to price parity with SATA at least for more budget-friendly ~2GB/s models, 4.0x4 will likely be similar for bringing 4-6GB/s SSDs to the masses.
    I don't think anybody expects this to be sata priced just yet, but at least it's better than previous 4.0 devices and Maybe will follow the 3.0x4 path. From quick check 4.0 is 2x the price of 3.0 right now, so if its like ~1.7x that would be nice. I just wonder if it will me 5$, 5% or even more than the current offerings.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Rdslw said:
    From quick check 4.0 is 2x the price of 3.0 right now, so if its like ~1.7x that would be nice.
    Give it 3-4 years for the "early adopter" tax to die off and the more likely outcome is that 3.0 SSD controllers will go extinct due to how little material and design cost difference there is between 3.0 and 4.0.
    Reply