PCIe Gen 4.0 is all the rage these days with AMD having fully embraced it on their X570 and B550 platforms (less so on the latter) and with Tigerlake parts supporting it for storage on the Intel side it's nice to see some more cost-conscious drives making their way to the market. While we do have faster controllers than the Phison E16 on the way, it doesn't mean it's a slouch today or something to worry about, especially in this price range. The Silicon Power US70 PCIe Gen 4.0 drive does offer a lot of value at comparable pricing to other Gen 3.0 high-performance drives at the same price point coming in at $164.99 for the 1TB we're looking at today.
Feature-wise the Silicon Power is fairly loaded from a DRAM Cache Buffer to SLC Caching. Some of the more intricate features include Wear Leveling where the drive equalizes the wear of each NAND flash block to limit the chance of damage or data loss over time. Over-Provision is present here in harmony with the Wear Leveling to help extend the useful lifespan of the drive. Bad Block management, or BBM as Silicon Power calls it, is able to detect and mark back blocks so that the drive avoids using them further ensuring long term reliability.
First Look At Silicon Power US70 1TB – Unboxing And Closer Look
The packaging of the Silicon Power US70 is the standard affair ready to hang on the shelf at a computer parts store. Ther is a nice window so that you're able to get a good look at the drive itself when picking out your purchase selection in person. That's about as far as the usefulness of the package goes. There's nothing to indicate performance metrics outside of knowing it's a Gen 4.0x4 drive and that it's NVMe 1.3 compatible. The warranty information is there, but nothing else. Hopefully in the future, they want to let potential customers know what they're offering in performance because their competition certainly is
The drive itself, it's blue. Now I know there are going to be people out there railing on the color and asking why there's no heatsink, but this isn't all bad. The Drive is covered by a large black sticker that will hide most of the blue PCB when installed in a typical system, but so many motherboards now come with built-in heatsinks on the board that I can understand this not bothering many people as it'll be covered anyway. If that isn't the case then you might want to either look at another drive with a heatsink or picking one up alongside if this is going to be your primary drive
Just for an example of the above discussion, this is that drive installed in my personal system in the primary PCIe Gen 4.0 Slot with an Adata SX8200 Pro 2TB as well and the result is clean as can be when done this way.
Silicon Power US70 PCIe Gen 4.0
| Capacity | 1TB, 2TB |
|---|---|
| Interface | PCIe Gen 4x4 |
| Performance Read Peak | up to 5,000 MB/s |
| Performance Write Peak | up to 4,400 MB/s |
| Meantime Between Failure | 1,700,000 hours |
| Warranty | 5 Year |
Testing Setup
Our test bench is now using the Ryzen 9 3900X on the ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Pro-WiFi so that now we have access to be able to take PCIe Gen 4 drives into account. We have the Ryzen 9 3900X clocked at 4.3GHz all core with the Hyper X Predator DDR4 3600 CL17. Before starting the tests I loaded the NVMe drive up to 60% capacity so that the testing would not be run on a clean empty drive.
| Component | Model |
|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 3900X @ 4.3GHz All Core |
| Motherboard | ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Pro-WiFi |
| Memory | Hyper X Predator 2x16GB (32GB) 3600MHz CL17 |
| PSU | Cooler Master V1200P |
| OS | Windows 10-64 Bit |
| GPU | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE |
| Case | Lian Li T70X |
Silicon Power US70 PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe 1TB
ATTO Disk Benchmark
As the industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely-accepted Disk Benchmark freeware software to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools utilized in the industry, Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid-state drives, RAID arrays as well as the host connection to attached storage. Top drive manufacturers, like Hitachi, build and test every drive using the ATTO Disk Benchmark.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host bus adapters (HBAs), hard drives, and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Crystal Disk Mark 6.0
CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software Made by a Japanese coder named Hiyohiyo and is one of the simplest and most frequently used tests for storage due to its simple and easy to understand UI. It measure sequential reads/writes speed,measure random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed,select test data (Random, 0Fill, 1Fill).
AS SSD
AS SSD is the opposite of ATTO as it uses incompressible data rather than compressible data and simulates the worst possible scenario imaginable for an SSD which gives the best understanding of performance when pushing the drive to its limits.
We separate the IOPS and MB/s in the results for ease of reading.
ANVIL's Storage Utilities
Anvil's Storage Utilities benchmark may be a bit of an older benchmark, but it's still very much relevant today. It takes various performance and response time metrics and gives them a score in read and writes then delivers an overall rating, which is useful to see where an HDD or SSD slots in general performance.
Conclusion
Sure, the Silicon Power US70 PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1TB drive is still rocking the Phison E16 controller and may not be quite as fast as some of the upcoming Gen 4.0 drives are claiming, but it does beat out even the fastest of the Gen 3.0 drives at around the same cost if you're in the market. The packaging may have been a let down with little to no real information on what you're getting but it does manage to deliver on the performance where it counts. The biggest advantage is indeed going to be the bigger file sizes you might be working with.
Your day to day isn't likely going to change a whole lot if you're just buying this as an upgrade over an existing performance PCIe Gen 3.0 drive but if you're building a new system that supports Gen 4.0 drives then you might want to keep an eye on this one. Especially if your new motherboard has a built-in heatsink to hide that ugly blue PCB behind.
Coming in at $164.99 on Amazon right now the Silicon Power US70 delivers great performance for the money and if you can get past, or hide, the bright blue PCB you'll be in for a great user experience.
The post Silicon Power US70 PCIe Gen 4.0 1TB NVMe SSD Review by Keith May appeared first on Wccftech.
source https://wccftech.com/review/silicon-power-us70-pcie-gen-4-0-1tb-nvme-ssd-review/