Silicon Power US70 PCIe Gen 4.0 1TB NVMe SSD Review-February 2024-www.yitit.com

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

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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

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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.

ATTO Write

512B

1KB

2KB

4KB

8KB

16KB

32KB

64KB

128KB

256KB

512KB

1MB

2MB

4MB

8MB

700

1400

2100

2800

3500

4200

700

1400

2100

2800

3500

4200

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 51

101

194

401

774

1.5k

2.8k

3.7k

3.9k

T-Force Cardea Gen4 39

161

357

607

1.2k

2.4k

3.6k

3.9k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 65

142

285

556

1.7k

2.3k

2.5k

2.7k

2.8k

T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming 50

100

207

399

767

1.4k

2.4k

2.8k

2.7k

2.8k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 68

135

278

547

982

1.6k

2.2k

2.4k

2.5k

2.6k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 75

148

288

552

1.2k

2.2k

2.9k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS 10

610

1.1k

1.9k

2.7k

2.8k

ATTO Read

512B

1KB

2KB

4KB

8KB

16KB

32KB

64KB

128KB

256KB

512KB

1MB

2MB

4MB

8MB

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 46

185

424

834

1.6k

2.5k

2.8k

4.5k

5.3k

5.2k

5.1k

T-Force Cardea Gen4 44

172

356

660

1.4k

2.5k

2.8k

4.5k

5.2k

5.3k

5.2k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 75

150

323

626

2.6k

2.7k

2.9k

3.1k

T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming 51

102

213

443

797

1.5k

2.4k

2.8k

2.9k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 76

157

330

645

2.8k

3.1k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 74

150

317

597

1.1k

2.4k

2.8k

3.1k

3.2k

3.3k

3.2k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS 12

414

644

895

1.8k

2.1k

2.3k

2.7k

3.1k

3.3k

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).

CrystalDiskMark 6

4KB Q1T1 Read

4KB Q1T1 Write

4KB Q32T1 Read

4KB Q32T1 Write

4KB Q8T8 Read

4KB Q8T8 Write

Sequential Reads

Sequential Writes

900

1800

2700

3600

4500

5400

900

1800

2700

3600

4500

5400

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 64

202

639

598

2.2k

4.2k

T-Force Cardea Gen4 61

234

614

406

1.8k

955

4.3k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 65

166

592

479

1.3k

1.5k

3.5k

3.1k

T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming 58

198

648

603

1.3k

2.3k

3.3k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 60

154

557

412

1.4k

3.5k

2.9k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 50

168

554

467

1.5k

2.2k

3.6k

3.3k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS 51

184

551

431

1.7k

3.5k

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.

AS SSD MB/s

4K Read

4k Write

4KB 64T Read

4KB 64T Write

Sequential Reads

Sequential Writes

900

1800

2700

3600

4500

5400

900

1800

2700

3600

4500

5400

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 77

184

2.2k

3.5k

4.2k

3.8k

T-Force Cardea Gen4 74

199

2.2k

3.1k

4.2k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 65

184

1.3k

2.6k

T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming 68

175

1.7k

2.8k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 61

178

1.4k

1.3k

2.5k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 54

187

1.6k

2.4k

2.9k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS 50

201

1.7k

2.1k

3.1k

2.8k

AS SSD IOPS

16MB Read

16MB Write

4K Read

4K Write

512B Read

512B Write

4KB 64T Read

4KB 64T Write

146024

292048

438072

584096

730120

876144

146024

292048

438072

584096

730120

876144

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 256

235

19.9k

47.5k

47.4k

49.3k

577.8k

876.1k

T-Force Cardea Gen4 259

243

18.5k

51k

10.2k

51.9k

574.2k

860.1k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 186

162

16.9k

46.9k

50.1k

48.1k

322.9k

339.1k

T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming 172

171

17.5k

40.2k

37.6k

47.1k

452.3k

723.9k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 187

148

15.7k

45.7k

48k

46.6k

349.4k

328.3k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 187

180

14.1k

47.7k

40.7k

50.6k

418.2k

630.6k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS 191

172

12.8k

51.6k

14.2k

47.6k

428.2k

570.1k

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.

Anvil's Storage Utilities

Read Score

Write Score

Total Score

4000

8000

12000

16000

20000

24000

4000

8000

12000

16000

20000

24000

Silicon Power Gen4 1TB 7.7k

12.1k

19.8k

T-Force Cardea Gen4 7.6k

11.5k

19.1k

HP EX950 1TB NVMe 6.2k

10k

16.2k

T-Force Cardea II TUF Gaming 5.5k

10.3k

15.8k

Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe 6.6k

9.4k

16k

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe 6.6k

10.5k

17.1k

WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe w/HS 6.4k

12k

18.5k

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.

8.75

Wccftech Rating

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.

Pros

Cost effective Gen 4.0 SSD Good performance for the money No frills No heatsink if you don't need it

Cons

Poor information on the packaging Blue PCB No heatsink if you need it

Buy for $164.99 from Amazon

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