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.



The Silicon Power UD90 is a value-optimized PCI-Express 4.0 M.2 NVMe drive. It uses the new Phison E21 4-channel 12 nm controller that was announced last year. The flash chips are Micron's latest and greatest B47R 176-layer 3D TLC flash. A DRAM cache chip is not included for cost reasons. Given the 12 nm design and the fact that we're working with a 4-channel controller here, it seems reasonable that Silicon Power isn't including a preinstalled heatsink, because heat output should be low, we'll test that of course.

The Silicon Power UD90 comes in capacities of 250 GB ($45), 500 GB ($60), 1 TB ($110) and 2 TB (unknown). Endurance for these models is set to 200 TBW, 300 TBW, 600 TBW and 1200 TBW respectively. Silicon Power includes a five-year warranty with the UD90 SSD.