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 UD70, which is a highly affordable QLC-based M.2 NVMe SSD. The UD70 is based on a combination of a Phison E12 controller paired with QLC flash from Micron. A Kingston DRAM chip provides 512 MB of storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The UD70 is very similar to the Corsair MP400 and the Sabrent Rocket Q. They all use the same controller and flash chips—the difference is in the size of DRAM cache: 1 GB on the MP400, 512 MB on the UD70 we’re reviewing here, and 256 MB on the Rocket Q. Since they’re based on the Phison E12, all three of these drives take advantage of PCI-Express Gen3 x4, not the newer Gen 4 x4.

The Silicon Power UD70 comes in capacities of 500 GB ($55), 1 TB ($110), and 2 TB ($210). Endurance for these models is set to 120 TBW, 260 TBW, and 530 TBW respectively. Silicon Power includes a five-year warranty with the UD70.