Silicon Power US70 M.2 NVMe SSD Review: The Ultra-Value M.2 Stick

Silicon Power’s US70 is one of the cheapest PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market, offering up to 5GBps of throughput for those just looking to speed up their computing experience by upgrading from a slow SATA SSD, or worse, an HDD. Not only is it fast, but it is also rated to endure up to 3.6PB of writes. However, despite all the value it offers, it lacks quite a bit in the looks department.

Silicon Power’s US70 is a generic E16-based SSD with Kioxia’s 96L TLC flash. The company designed the SSD to deliver near-bleeding-edge Gen4 performance, but that was before the release of recent beasts like WD’s Black SN850 and Samsung’s 980 Pro. Still, while not quite as fast as those newer models, it’s much cheaper and comes packing some hefty endurance ratings that place it up there as one of the most enduring consumer SSDs you can buy – its endurance rating is three times higher than both the WD Black SN850 and Samsung 980 Pro. 

Specifications

The US70 is available in limited capacities of 1TB and 2TB with street prices of $175 and $320, respectively. Silicon Power’s US70 is rated to deliver up to 5/4.4 GBps of sequential read/write throughput and can sustain 750,000 random read/write IOPS.

Unlike some SSDs that leverage static or hybrid cache architectures, Silicon Power’s US70 comes with a large dynamic SLC write cache that spans one-third of the device’s available capacity. Silicon Power’s US70 quickly and predictably flushes its cache to enable consistent performance not only days after your last workload but also within only minutes.

With Phison’s fourth-generation LDPC ECC, the US70 is not only backed by a five-year warranty, but Silicon Power rates the US70 to endure up to three times as many writes as Samsung’s 980 Pro at both capacities. The US70 supports Trim,  S.M.A.R.T. data reporting, and has secure erase capability, but it lacks AES 256-bit hardware encryption.

Software and Accessories

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Silicon Power supports the US70 with a very basic SSD toolbox that isn't comparable to the sophisticated level of Samsung’s Magician or WD’s SSD Dashboard. Silicon Power’s SSD Toolbox allows you to monitor the device’s health and temperature as well as run some simple diagnostic tests.

A Closer Look

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Silicon Power’s US70 comes in an M.2 2280 double-sided form factor at each capacity, meaning there are components on each side of the PCB, preventing it from being used in the most ultra-slim devices that require single-sided SSDs. The US70 is definitely lacking aesthetically with an unappealing sticker over top of the components, and the blue PCB is hard to match with other components.

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Silicon Power’s U70 leverages Phison’s PS5016-E16 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 SSD controller. This quad-core controller incorporates dual 28nm Cortex R5 CPUs and CoXProcessor 2.0 technology to enable fast and consistent write performance and better efficiency. The controller affords the US70 end-to-end data path protection, Active State Power Management (ASPM), Autonomous Power State Transition (APST), and the L1.2 ultra-low power mode with support for thermal throttling if needed.

Unlike cheaper alternatives like Adata’s XPG Gammix S50 Lite, the controller in the US70 leverages a DRAM buffer for FTL table mapping. There are two SK hynix 8Gb DDR4 DRAM ICs clocked at 1,600 MHz on our 2TB sample, one on each side of the PCB, while the 1TB model should come with half of that.

The US70 has a total of four NAND packages, two on each side of the PCB, with each package containing eight 512Gb dies of Kioxia’s 96L TLC (thirty-two in total). The flash interfaces with the controller at speeds of 800 MTps over eight NAND channels. The flash features a dual-plane architecture for higher interleaving performance.