Introduction

Silicon Power is a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer founded in 2003. In enthusiast circles, they are well known for providing high-quality flash storage products at reasonable pricing. Silicon Power's various product lines include DRAM modules, SSDs, flash drives, and portable storage.



In today's review, we'll be taking a look at the Silicon Power XS70 1 TB SSD. This latest SSD release is built around Phison's highly popular E18 controller paired with the newest 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash from Micron—a combination we've seen in several other SSDs before, like the Kingston KC3000 and Corsair MP600 Pro LPX. Also included is 1 GB of DRAM cache from Samsung; it seems we're finally seeing a widespread market release of these Phison E18 with B47R drives.

The Silicon Power XS70 comes in capacities of 1 TB ($130), 2 TB ($250), and 4 TB ($750). Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW, 1400 TBW, and 3000 TBW respectively. Silicon Power includes a five-year warranty with the XS70.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Silicon Power XS70 connects to the host system using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and four flash chips; one DRAM cache chip is installed, too, but the other side of the PCB is empty.


Silicon Power's cooler is a great-looking design that combines the black heatsink with a gray metal highlight. Nice!


The heatsink is installed using a clamshell construction with four screws.


On the previous picture, it seems like contact might be sub-optimal, but this photo confirms that everything makes good contact with the heatsink.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The four flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND B47R. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


A Samsung DDR4-2666 chip provides 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup