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 XD80, which is the company's new high-performance PCIe Gen 3 TLC-based SSD that was announced last month. The XD80 is based on a combination of a Phison E12 controller paired with TLC flash from Toshiba. A UnilC DRAM chip provides 512 MB of storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The Silicon Power XD80 comes in capacities of 256 GB ($48), 512 GB ($78), 1 TB ($126), and 2 TB ($243). Endurance for these models is set to 380 TBW, 800 TBW, 1665 TBW, and 3115 TBW respectively. Silicon Power includes a five-year warranty with the XD80.

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 XD80 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


A heatsink comes preinstalled, it's basically a relatively thin metal plate attached with thermal tape.


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

Chip Component Analysis

The flash controller is made by Phison. The PS5012-E12S supports TLC, 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 TLC flash chips are made by Toshiba, built using 96 layers.


One Xi'an UnilC Semiconductor DDR3-1866L chip provides 512 MB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables in. This is the first time we encounter DDR memory made by UnilC, a Chinese memory manufacturer who inherited its original DRAM IP from Infineon and Qimonda, but is now actively developing their own technologies.

Test Setup