Storage

Silicon Power XPower XS70 Review

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April 27, 2022 6 Min Read
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A Phison E18 based SSD from Silicon Power which claims to hit transfer rates of up to 7300MB/s.


Product on Review: XPower XS70
Manufacturer: Silicon Power
Street Price: 1TB Model – $130 USD | $250 AUD

While the SSD market is still largely populated by PCIe 3.0 drives, PCIe 4.0 are shaping up to takeover with a plethora of models available. Silicon Power are well known for their flash-based products and while we may not have featured any of their drives specifically for review, we have used them personally in our systems and can vouch for their performance, reliability and value.

Today sees us explore our first Phison E18 based SSD under the Silicon Power XPower XS70. SP claim this drive is capable of hitting up to an astounding 7300MB/s. In our review we’ll be pitting it against the renowned Samsung 980 Pro and other PCIe 3.0 drives to see how it stacks up!


Silicon Power on their XS70
With a standard data transfer rate that’s 2x faster than the 3.0 version, the XS70 PCIe Gen 4×4 with 3D NAND flash memory and NVMe 1.4 support is exactly what serious gamers need to crush the competition. Mind-blowing continuous read and write speeds up to 7,300MB/s and 6,800MB/s, respectively, enable the XS70 to push the limits of what an SSD can do so you can break new records.

Technical Specifications


Below are the technical specifications surrounding the XS70:

Capacity
1TB. 2TB, 4TB

Form Factor
M.2 2280

Interface
PCIe Gen4x4

Speed
Sequential Read – Up to 7300MB/s
Sequential Write – Up to 6800MB/s

NAND flash
76-Layer TLC NAND Flash

Controller
Phison PS5018-E18

Operating Temperature
0° to 70° C

MTBF
1,600,000 Hours

Dimension (L x W x H)
80mm x 24.6mm x 10.8mm

Weight
33g

Closer Look



Silicon Power has decided to opt for the minimalist approach with packaging on the XS70, which is a great idea since this can be easily recycled once the drive is removed. As you can see there is very little by way of information, aside from some of the basic stats surrounding the speed, capacity and warranty. To extract the drive from the packet, we just need to slice the back. The drive comes on its own with a plastic container.




XS70 conforms to the M.2 form factor and more specifically the 2280 size, although, as you can see it comes with a custom heatsink which does add some bulk to the usual size of an M.2 drive. XS70 measures 80mm x 24.6mm x 10.8mm and weighs in at 33g. Overall, the design is sleek and should marry up with other hardware very well due to the neutral theme.

XS70 is marketed as being compatible with the PS5 console, this covers both the technology specifications and the physical dimensions too.

Over the next pages we’ll be putting the XS70 under examination to see what you can expect in terms of performance.

Test Setup & Methodology


Our test system is formatted and a fresh version of Windows is installed with just drives in place – no additional applications. Windows is then updated to the latest release and the drivers are installed.

Included in the list of benchmarks are the following applications:

BENCHMARKS

Anvil Pro
AS SSD
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46
AIDA64


TEST CONFIG

CPU Intel Core i9-12900K
Motherboard MSI Z690 UNIFY
Graphics GIGABYTE RTX 3060
Memory 64GB CORSAIR Dominator Platinum RGB DDR5
Storage Silicon Power XPower XS70 1TB
PSU Corsair HX1050 Gold
OS Microsoft Windows 11 Professional 64-Bit

Benchmarks: Anvil Pro


Anvil Pro from Anvil Storage utilities is one of the most popular storage benchmarking utilities today thanks to the large suit of tests available. You can test pretty much anything from Read/write Speed to IOPs with many variables to tweak allowing you to get either a single or host of results to compare with other likeminded enthusiasts. In our test we ran the standard suite 5 times, subtracting both the highest and lowest scores and determined the final result from the average of the remaining three results.


Benchmarks: AS SSD

AS SSD Benchmark is a straightforward tool for measuring the speed of your SSD drive.

Simply launch the program, choose your drive, click Start, and it’ll test your SSD’s read and write speed in a variety of ways, delivering a score for each when it’s done. And if that’s not enough, there are also additional file copy and compression-related benchmarks available from the Tools menu. (The author’s support page is German only, but if you need further English explanations then there’s a thread on the program at the OCZ Technology forum.).

Benchmarks: ATTO

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Benchmarks: AIDA64

AIDA64 Product Page
This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example — with HyperThreading disabled — the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.

Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is an open source disk drive benchmark tool for Microsoft Windows. Based on Microsoft’s MIT-licensed Diskspd tool, this graphical benchmark is commonly used for testing the performance of solid-state storage. It works by reading and writing through the filesystem in a volume-dependent way. It generates read/write speeds in sequential and random positions with varying numbers of queues and threads.


Conclusion


The ability of XS70 is undeniable, if you’ve just checked out the previous pages – it’s crystal clear that we have a blazing fast SSD in our hands here, and one which won’t break the bank either.

Most of the drives in our performance testing use the PCIe 3.0 interface, only the well-known Samsung 980 Pro is on an equal playing field and Silicon Power’s XS70 pushes beyond the throughput and IOPS results of this drive.


If you have a motherboard with PCIe 4.0 capabilities, then XS70 is a superb choice and it’s available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB options. Silicon Power are also extremely keen to emphasise that this drive is ready for the PS5 both in terms of the tech compatibility and the footprint (The included heatsink presents no obstruction issues).

XS70 is available to buy in a variety of capacities from 1TB to 4TB. Our 1TB model is priced at $130 USD | $250 AUD
. This drive is also backed by a lengthy 5-year warranty which is considerably more generous than we’ve encountered for a storage drive.

XS70 is an impressive drive with astounding performance, slick aesthetics and is kind on the wallet. We highly recommend it!

Pros
+ Pushes performance
+ Clean styling
+ Reasonably priced
+ 5 Years Warranty

Cons
– None apparent


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