Silicon Power XD80 2 TB NVMe PCIe 3.0 X4 SSD review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words

NVMe SSDs like the XD80 are golden in my book. These are excellent low-cost SSDs that offer a truckload of performance. Why am I so positive about the XD80, you might wonder? Well, as stated, it's a rock-solid NVMe SSD for any PC of any kind. It's plenty fast and performs well on a wide scope of workloads. The best has yet to come through; our tested 2 TB unit sells at 12 cents per TB (USD) based on street prices. Paired with that, you get 5 years warranty. However, the absolute best thing is that the NAND flash is written as TLC, and combined with all variables, the endurance levels are impressive.

Excellent Endurance

Endurance then, how long is that SSD going to last you as a minimum before cells start to deplete and data gets moved to remain NAND cells. Well, the bigger you go, the better, and it sure is good for the 2TB model. In respective order 380 TBW, 800 TBW, 1665 TBW, and 3115 TBW for our tested 2 TB model. Silicon Power also fires off a five-year warranty with the XD80. The lifespan on a 2TB model would be dozens of years, depending on workload. Most people do not even write 50 GB per month, but let's change that to 50GB per day x 365 Days/yr = 18.25 TBW per year. 3115 / 18.25 = 170 years and half that for each halved volume size. And really, writing 50GB per day is a lot!

pSLC

The only thing I can remark that the pSLC buffer of close to 50 GB might be a little small, but really .. how often do you write that much data sustained? After the cache depletes you're looking at 1 GB/sec writes, and that is still very fast.

DRAM Cache

This SSD series has a DRAM buffer in an easy-to-remember ratio, the 1TB model has 1GB DRAM, the 2TB version 2GB DRAm. That DRAM is used for mapping tables (mapping table lookup in the DRAM to get the physical address and then access FLASH to get data. 

Price

We looked up some street prices, the 1 TB model sells at 121 USD/EUR. The 2 TB model we spotted at 243 EUR/USD. So it all sits at that comfortable 12 cents per GB level. Mind you, these are street retail prices, and as with everything these days, prices do fluctuate per day. 

  

Concluding

We can't complain really. One remark I could make is the aluminum heatshield, it's a bit hard to peel off if you'd need to remove it if you wanted to place it under a motherboard heatsink. Other than that the XD80 is price competitive, offers proper endurance, has 5 years warranty, and offers performance levels that any PC gamer would be proud of. You can argue the pSLC buffer size, but the reality is that for 99% of the end-users out there it's more that plentiful. This SSD, as such, is most definitely approved with exquisite endurance levels.

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