Introduction

Silicon Power XD80 2 TB Review - PCIe 3.0 x4

Powered by a Phison 5012-E12 controller and paired with 3D TLC NAND Silicon Power offers something rather attractive in relation to sheer NAND volume storage versus value. The XD80 from Silicon power series is not targeted at an enthusiast audience but rather is released as a mainstream high-capacity NVMe SSD series with very decent performance. It's plenty fast in any segment as a premium PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD, and due to strong buffers and full utilization of NAND channels, we did not hit a TLC/QLC write buffer issue either. Yeah, Silicon power recently announced the launch of the new XD80 Gen3 PCIe x4 NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive, taking advantage of 3D TLC NAND technology to store massive amounts of data with lightning-fast transfer speeds of up to 3,400MB/sec sequential read and 3,000MB/sec sequential writes.

The XD80 is based on a blend of a Phison E12 controller paired with TLC flash from Kioxia both paired with a 512 MB cache of storage, to store mapping tables. Of course, there's a pSLC buffer present as well. The Silicon Power XD80 comes in several storage volumes 256 GB ($48), 512 GB ($78), 1 TB ($126), and 2 TB ($243), which are current street prices.

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.