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.



Today, we are taking a look at the Silicon Power UD70, which is a highly affordable QLC-based M.2 NVMe SSD. The UD70 is based on a combination of a Phison E12 controller paired with QLC flash from Micron. A Kingston DRAM chip provides 512 MB of storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The UD70 is very similar to the Corsair MP400 and the Sabrent Rocket Q. They all use the same controller and flash chips—the difference is in the size of DRAM cache: 1 GB on the MP400, 512 MB on the UD70 we're reviewing here, and 256 MB on the Rocket Q. Since they're based on the Phison E12, all three of these drives take advantage of PCI-Express Gen3 x4, not the newer Gen 4 x4.

The Silicon Power UD70 comes in capacities of 500 GB ($55), 1 TB ($110), and 2 TB ($210). Endurance for these models is set to 120 TBW, 260 TBW, and 530 TBW respectively. Silicon Power includes a five-year warranty with the UD70.

Packaging

The Drive

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


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Silicon Power UD70 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


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

Chip Component Analysis

The flash controller is made by Phison. The PS5012-E12S supports QLC and PCI-Express 3.0 x4. It uses eight flash channels and is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The main difference to the E12 without the "S" is that the E12S is physically smaller, works with half the DRAM capacity of the E12, and uses a metal case, which helps with thermals.


The four QLC flash chips are made by Micron, built using 96 layers.


One Kingston DDR3-1866 chip provides 512 MB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables in.

Test Setup