Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
Silicon Power is offering a product with great performance, and temperatures and includes a heatsink that is actually working. All that at the 13 cents per GB marker really feels comfortable. Combine that with the 700 TBW value and that should bring a smile to your face. It simply gives excellent performance when paired with a Phison controller PS5018-E18-based device. It is quick but not as fast as some of the other competitors at this level. That said, in this conclusion, we'll discuss a little about relativity, because breaching the 7 GB/sec barrier won't always make your gaming PC a lot quicker, and that's a raw act. The good news is that SP is not demanding outrageous pricing for this exceptional product. Yes, this 7 GB/sec NVMe SSD is not cheapo, but at under 15 cents per GB, I am not discontented. This is a high-performance SSD with TLC writing, a long lifespan, and a 5-year warranty. At that price, you'd be hard-pressed not to like this product, wouldn't you?
Do we really need 7000MB/sec storage units?
Um no? This is a premium performance product, often synthetically measured, and you'd need serious workloads to get the best out of it. Your PC isn't going to boot faster as your OS is the bottleneck, your PC games might load a fraction of a second faster, your application load up just as quickly as an NVMe SSD with reads/writes in the 2 GB/sec marker. Guys, this is the honest truth. However, the same folk that purchases a GeForce RTX 3090 or Radeon RX 6900 XT combined with some sort Core i9 or Ryzen 9 series processor, it's for those guys where that last sniff of performance matters, whether that is realistic or not, I'll leave open to discussion. In retrospect, however, we do have new technologies coming up like DirectStorage. This will allow the graphics card to load textures directly from the SSD bypassing the processor, freeing up processor cycles for other tasks, and speeding up texture load times. In this way, if they have a fast M.2 disk, they will be in the game in less than 5 seconds even on large maps, a negligible time compared to the loading times we are used to today. That technology will be released in the Windows 11 timeframe.
Endurance
Sp offers 700 TBW (Terabytes Written) for the 1TB model, coupled with an MTBF of up to 1,600,000 Hours (Mean Time Between Failures). We talked so much about this in the past already, endurance, the number of times NAND cells can be written before they burst and shatter into small pieces (well, they just die and are mapped out, any data present on that cell is written to a healthy one). Bigger volume sizes mean more NAND cells; more NAND cells thus increase endurance. For the 2TB model, you'll get a rated 1400 TBW; the 1 TB model marks 700 TB written. So how long does a 700 TWB storage unit last before NAND flash cells go the way of the dodo? Well, if you are a really extreme user, you might be writing 50 GB per day (normal users likely won't even write that per week), but based on that value, 50GB x 365days= 18.25 TB per year written. So that's over 38 years of usage, double that for the 2TB SSD. And again, writing 50 GB per day is a very enthusiastic value.
Thermals
The controller is fitted with a heatsink and that shows, we know the E18 can get very hot, resulting in thermal throttling under an extreme workload. This will not be an issue as the heatsink included really works well. Also, this SSD is PS5 compatible, including that heatsink.
Performance
The XS70 is a very fast product. Overall read performance increases from 3GB to well over 6.5 GB/sec. Trace game testing revealed that performance is fast as well. Of course, our 1TB model was slightly slower in writes compared to a 2TB model, which can address a few more NAND channels.
Concluding
The SP XS70 is an M.2 2280 NVMe SSD that utilizes Phison's fastest E18 controller with newer firmware and Micron 176 -Layer TLC 3D NAND flash to support capacities of up to 4TB. There are three storage capacities available: 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. Realistically the biggest performance benefit is deriving from the new B47 series Phison firmware, but small file performance has greatly increased with the latest updates. We do believe you will not notice the real-world effect and difference between a 3GB/sec and a 7GB/sec SSD anytime soon, but DirectStorage is getting supported, and that's where it will matter. If an application loads in a fraction of a second, it will be quicker in that fraction of a second. Other than that somewhat personal remark, all lights are green, TLC, high endurance, and warranty. The included heatsink really works well and prevents thermal throttling. Of course, to get the best out of it, you'll need a PCIe Gen 4 infrastructure, and at the time of writing, that means a compatible Ryzen processor on, say, a B550 or X570 chipset-based platform. When the workloads match, the unit will make you shiver with performance, and when they are not, you will be limited to high-end NVMe performance (select workloads). NVMe protocol version 1.4; this SSD is one of the first to support the new NVMe 1.4 standard. You do not need to install any additional drivers; only ensure that your operating system is up to date. After that, install and format the SSD, and you're good to go. Silicon power warrants the storage unit for a period of five years / or the claimed TBW value. It's uncertain if you'll ever require this level of performance or perceive a real-world difference between generation 3.0 and generation 4.0 devices. The good news is that as performance improves, both the low-end and mainstream markets will evolve. Consider for a moment that 3 GB/sec NVMe SSDs are fast becoming the industry standard and are presently readily accessible. The XS70 offers great performance, comes with a nice warranty, has a heatsink included, and ain't priced too higher either. This is a definite solid product in our book.
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