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.
