Silicon Power P34A80 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 NVMe SSD Review: TLC Performance at QLC Prices

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Conclusion

Silicon Power’s latest PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD lacks a creative name, but that doesn’t mean it is any less worth looking into. As a matter of fact, it should be high up on your list if you are in the market for a new SSD today. It’s actually a great buy.

Performance is just as expected, given it's powered by Phison’s E12 NVMe controller and Toshiba BiCS3 TLC NAND flash. That's an established pairting that we've seen in drives before, to there wasn’t much mystery around how it would perform. In our testing, it basically mirrored the MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro, another E12 powered SSD, and delivered high-end performance overall. While its write speed degrades to 1GBps, this is significantly better than that of some others like the Intel 660P or even any SATA SSD.

The P34A80 comes backed with a 5-year warranty, which is great to see. But, because of its lower prices, endurance takes quite the hit. At 500TBW, our 1TB P34A80 has slightly lower endurance than that of the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro, WD Black SN750, and Samsung 970 EVO Plus, and about a third the endurance of the MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro. That's definitely something to keep in mind if you plan on regular workloads that hammer the drive with lots of writes.

Aesthetics could use some improvement too. While Silicon Power’s P3485 model features a small and quite attractive looking heatsink overtop, like many other products out there, the P34A80 we have here today could use some better looks. Placing a product SKU overtop is not the way to impress customers looking to put their drive in a windowed case. Likewise, the lack of up-to-date software support is an issue, which we hope the company will correct soon.

But, these minor qualms can't overshadow the P34A80’s value. Silicon Power’s P34A80 is a high-performance device, but its prices aren’t reflective of such. At just $0.11-0.15 per GB, depending on capacity, the drive is even cheaper than the QLC based SSDs at some capacities.

I’d recommend this over similarly priced QLC drives like the Intel 660P or Crucial P1 any day of the week. You get higher performance and endurance for essentially the same price. Again, what’s not to love about that?

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Sean Webster
Sean Webster
Storage Reviewer

Sean is a Contributing Editor at Tom’s Hardware US, covering storage hardware.

12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • zaphod_
    It seems Silicon Power is grossly conservative with the endurance rating. Similar drives have dramatically higher published endurance ratings. I would assume the same nand and same controller would have the same, or very similar, endurance. This is indeed the case with other E12/bics3 nand drives. The BPX Pro and MP510 are identical hardware with over-provisioning have ~1700TBW/960GB. Inland Premium (Microcenter house brand) is same hardware without any over-provisioning has a 1600TBW endurance for a 1TB drive.

    Its hard to believe the Silicon Power P34A80 has less than a third of the endurance of other drives featuring the exact same hardware.

    Where does the meager 125TBW/256GB endurance rating come from? It doesn't appear that Silicon Power published an endurance number on their website.
    Reply
  • zaphod_
    Sabrent Rocket is another budget E12/bics3 drive with a rating of 1665 TBW/1TB.
    TEAM GROUP MP34 is also rated at 1665 TBW/1TB.

    Five other drives with the E12/bics3 all have 1600+ TBW for a 1TB class drive.
    Hard to believe that the Silicon Power only has 500TBW/1TB
    Reply
  • seanwebster
    zaphod_ said:
    It seems Silicon Power is grossly conservative with the endurance rating. Similar drives have dramatically higher published endurance ratings. I would assume the same nand and same controller would have the same, or very similar, endurance. This is indeed the case with other E12/bics3 nand drives. The BPX Pro and MP510 are identical hardware with over-provisioning have ~1700TBW/960GB. Inland Premium (Microcenter house brand) is same hardware without any over-provisioning has a 1600TBW endurance for a 1TB drive.

    Its hard to believe the Silicon Power P34A80 has less than a third of the endurance of other drives featuring the exact same hardware.

    Where does the meager 125TBW/256GB endurance rating come from? It doesn't appear that Silicon Power published an endurance number on their website.
    I would guess that it has to do with limiting their liability. The endurance ratings come directly from the company after my inquiry.
    Reply
  • zaphod_
    It seems quite likely the Silicon Power endurance information is erroneous. How could one explain that of the six drives mentioned, all with Phison E12 controller and BICS3 NAND, five have 1600+TBW ratings and one has a 500TBW rating. Logic would suggest the 500TBW rating is simply wrong.
    Reply
  • veegee24
    zaphod_ said:
    It seems quite likely the Silicon Power endurance information is erroneous. How could one explain that of the six drives mentioned, all with Phison E12 controller and BICS3 NAND, five have 1600+TBW ratings and one has a 500TBW rating. Logic would suggest the 500TBW rating is simply wrong.

    I contacted their tech support, they said the 2TB model has an endurance of 3115TB.
    Reply
  • ken-wawa
    According to the review, this disk should ensure AES encryption. How to start using it/set password? Is that executed through disk password in BIOS? Have anyone succeded in setting this? If yes in what laptop?
    Reply
  • ken-wawa
    Ok, I've received the answer from Silicon Technology and... they are saying that this disk is NOT supporting any encryption. As I was furious and very confused I've asked them once again and they answered the same saying that they confirmed this twice with engineers. So forget about hardware encryption guys.....
    Reply
  • Joshua_157
    Admin said:
    The Silicon Power P34A80 comes with all the performance you could ask for from a high-end TLC based SSD at a similar cost to those QLC based SSDs like the Intel SSD 660p and Crucial P1. What’s not to love?

    Silicon Power P34A80 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 NVMe SSD Review: TLC Performance at QLC Prices : Read more
    I have this and I am returning it for incompatibility reasons.
    it's like this , every ssd Nvme Pcie I have reports as 512 sector the brands are Crucial and Samsung yet this reports as 4096 regardless of the enclosure you put it in as I also found out that all enclosures use the same chipset .It means you can't clone to this drive because it does not use 512e it's 4kn and that is the way it stays .
    I'm going back to Samsung at least I know I can clone to their drives because of the chipset they use which is different from the Silicon power chipset.
    It's something you should be aware of as I have dragged the internet looking for some meaningful advice but in the end nobody knows , so just be aware you can't change the sector size and it will always report as 4096 because of the controller.
    Reply
  • seanwebster
    Joshua_157 said:
    I have this and I am returning it for incompatibility reasons.
    it's like this , every ssd Nvme Pcie I have reports as 512 sector the brands are Crucial and Samsung yet this reports as 4096 regardless of the enclosure you put it in as I also found out that all enclosures use the same chipset .It means you can't clone to this drive because it does not use 512e it's 4kn and that is the way it stays .
    I'm going back to Samsung at least I know I can clone to their drives because of the chipset they use which is different from the Silicon power chipset.
    It's something you should be aware of as I have dragged the internet looking for some meaningful advice but in the end nobody knows , so just be aware you can't change the sector size and it will always report as 4096 because of the controller.
    Interestingly, there are tools out there to change that tho. Have you emailed them? I know Sabrent has one for their E12-based SSDs. You can also use your motherboard's built-in secure erase tool to switch between 512e and 4K sectors if it has one. What software are you using? Ideally, it should be able to clone over the data regardless of source and destination sector sizes, it seems tho that the software is lagging support for the hardware here.
    Reply
  • Co BIY
    Amazon reviews on the Silicon Power P34A80 report that the Toshiba NAND has been replaced by a UNIC branded package and that the Hynix DDR4 DRAM has been replaced with Nanya DDR3.

    I would think that the expected performance from DDR3 would be less.

    - From Zaphod_"How could one explain that of the six drives mentioned, all with Phison E12 controller and BICS3 NAND, five have 1600+TBW ratings and one has a 500TBW rating. Logic would suggest the 500TBW rating is simply wrong."

    Bait and Switch was probably planned and explains the extremely conservative endurance numbers put out.

    My guess is that Silicon Power's P34A60 reviewed with Intel NAND will probably also be subbed for brand-Xi chips.

    I have been shopping for a new boot/main drive and this is the second drive I have been very close to buying only to find that the drive for sale is not the same as the drive reviewed and compared to the competition. I was looking at buying the highly rated XPG SX8200 Pro recommended here at Tom's but found that recent purchaser's found that the expected Micron NAND had been replaced by UNIC branded chips and I saw that the production location listed had changed from "Made in Taiwan" to "Made in China".

    I expect that businesses will switch suppliers and that they will cut corners to cut costs. I know a "Bait and Switch" is just a traditional, if dishonest and dirty, sales tactic.

    Sometimes a dishonest business tactic is a small part of a larger aggressive totalitarian state run pattern of abuse that has real and serious consequences.

    From Anandtech - Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. and UNIC Memory Technology belong to Tsinghua Unigroup, a government-controlled high-tech conglomerate from China.

    Anyway now looking at the Crucial P5 or WD SN550. I feel like I'm more likely to be getting what i think I'm getting.

    Both the XPG and this Silicon Power SSD are still on the Best SSDs of 2020 but are not the same product that was tested. I think they should be retested as currently sold.
    Reply