Final Thoughts
Silicon Power’s US70 Gen4 NVMe solid state drive is much like many other first generation Gen4 drives. Many of them use the same controller (Phison E16) and 96-layer TLC NAND. This is a great combination and will give you sequential performance of 5000 MB/s read and 4400 MB/s write. In our testing we saw results pretty close to that. On top of that the US70 does not ship with a heatsink, but we noticed that it really did not need one. Many of the other Gen4 drives we’ve tested came with some pretty hefty heatsinks.
The downside of this controller and memory configuration even if you have cache chips is as soon as that cache is depleted the write performance of the drive drops significantly. We saw the cache get depleted within 2-3% of our linear write test. This is definitely something to keep in mind if you are going to be doing a lot of sustained writes to the drive.
One thing that this drive has going for it compared to other similar Gen4 drives is that the endurance ratings are very high, 1800 TBW for the 1TB and 3600 TBW for the 2TB. Also Silicon Power is backing this drive with a 5-year warranty.
The 2TB version of the drive that we reviewed today is selling for $329.99 at our favorite online retailer. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Silicon Power US70 PCIe 4.0 NVMe Solid State Drive a 9 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Great performance
– Heatsink not needed
– Availble in up to 2TB capacity
– Great endurance rating and 5-year warranty
Cons:
– Toolbox software sort of basic
– Write performance takes a hit once cache is depleted
