Introduction
Silicon Power XPOWER XS70 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 4.0)
Breaching 7 GB/sec M.2.Class SSD rendition for a mainstream price
We review the Silicon Power XPOWER XS70 NVMe SSD, armed with a very fast NAND and PCIe Gen 4.0 controller, this unit offers durability and PCIe 4.0 performance levels above 7 GB/sec. it's also PS5 compatible and includes a heatsink. Silicon Power's XS70, also known as the XPower XS70, features a maximum bandwidth of 7.3 GBps, which is basically the limit for consumer PCIe 4.0 SSDs. This drive supports up to 1 million IOPS and comes with a five-year / guarantee.
The NAND flash chips used are their own Micron's latest 176-layer 3D based on TLC technology. The new flash chips have marginally increased overall performance and much faster write rates. Today, the tested product is available for $130 USD/EUR for the 1TB model. For that 1 TB model, that equates to a very competitive 13 cents per GB. Keep in mind that this is a TLC-written NVMe SSD outfitted with a controller that actually is a Phison E18 controller, capable of some reaping benefits inside your storage array. PCIe Gen 4.0 for those that want top-notch high-performance at a fair price, this PCIe Gen 4 x4 M2 unit might be what you are after. The product is available in multiple volumes and sizes. There's the 4TB, 2TB versions yet we test, and a 1 TB model. The company is pleading numbers that run into the 7300 MB/s, Write Speeds, and up to 6800 MB/s for the fastest 2 TB and 4TB M2 SSD. They a offer proper 5 years warranty. The TBW (TeraBytes Written—the total amount of data that a company is willing to guarantee can be written to the drive) rated 1400 TBW for the 2 TB model and 700 TBW for the 1 TB model. The IOPS values are staggering as well, roughly 1 Million each way.
The specs are outstanding but will this unit deliver what it claims? SSD is based on the trendy 8-channel Phison's PS5018-E18 controller and, of course, has been fitted with TLC written NAND. The performance will vary slightly depending on volume size; the more significant, the faster, though. The SSD is a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe 1.4) M.2 2280 form factor SSD. The performance numbers of a proper SATA3 SSD offers these days are simply excellent, but with the more niche NVMe SSDs you can multiply performance 14x, and that offers serious numbers. The unit follows a smaller M.2 2280 form factor (8cm), so it will fit on most ATX motherboards capable of M.2 just fine. Anyway, wanna see how fast it really is? Will this be a proper Samsung 980 PRO competitor (heck yes). Next page and onwards into the review then.
