Dual Self-Cooling System:
While PCIe SSDs like the UD70 offer impressive performance, they also generate a good amount of heat. To combat this, Silicon Power incorporated a dual self-cooling system that operates via active state power management (ASPM) and autonomous power state transition (APST). In addition, thermal throttling effectively monitors and controls the temperature to prevent sudden speed drops or damage of stored data caused by high temperature.
Thanks to ASPM and ASPT, the UD70's temperature hovered around 28 ºC when idle. Under heavy loads, the drive reached temperatures as high as 63 ºC when reading and 69 ºC when writing.
These temperatures had no impact on the UD70's read speeds. However, when it would hit about 69 ºC, thermal throttling would kick in and slow the drive's sequential write speed. Instead of an sudden drop in performance though, the UD70 gradually slowed until it reached a speed where the temperature did not exceed 69 ºC.
If you're going to push the UD70 hard and don't want thermal throttling to activate, you may want to consider adding a cooling fan or attach a heatsink to the drive. With a 12cm fan blowing over the drive, the drive peaked at 54 ºC when reading and 62 ºC when writing. As a result, thermal throttling did not occur.
Final Thoughts:
The Silicon Power UD70 is a great choice for the casual gamer or video editor looking for a fast, yet affordable, PCIe SSD that keeps its cool no matter how hard you push it. This compact, M.2 form factor drive is powered by Phison's PS5012-E12S controller and is available with up to 2TB of Micron's 96-layer QLC NAND flash. Combine this with an SLC cache, DRAM cache buffer and a PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe 1.3 interface and you have a drive capable of delivering more than six times the performance of your average SATA SSD. In our sequential read and write tests, the 2TB version of the UD70 was able to read at speeds as high as 3,477 MB/s and write at speeds in excess of 2,970 MB/s. It also did very well in our random write tests, producing nearly 208,000 IOPS at low queue depths.
Of course, fast read and write speeds aren't the only things the UD70 has to offer. The drive is engineered with a dual self-cooling system that did a pretty good job of keeping temperatures down without the need for a heatsink. The UD70 also employs features like LDPC (Low-Density Parity Check) error correction, End-To-End (E2E) data protection and a RAID engine for enhanced data integrity and stability as well as AES 256-bit encryption for data security. To top it all off, the UD70 is covered by a five year warranty.
The UD70 is available now in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Prices on Silicon Power's website start at $57 and go up to $190 for the 2TB version reviewed here.
Highs:
- Available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities
- PCIe 3.0 x4 interface with NVMe protocol
- Phison PS5012-E12S controller
- Equipped with Micron 96-layer 3D QLC NAND
- Excellent sequential and random read and write performance
- Dual self-cooling system
- Small M.2 2280 form factor
- LDPC ECC technology, End-To-End (E2E) data protection and RAID engine
- SLC caching and DRAM cache buffer
- AES 256-bit encryption
- Reasonably priced
- 5 year warranty
Lows:
- DRAM cache smaller than other drives
- Write speed drops when SLC cache is full
