Silicon Power XS70 Gen4x4 SSD Review

Right off the bat I’ll say this is a good drive. If you are here to get your validation that the thing you’ve already bought is good, you have it. Those that want to know more about this Silicon Power XS70 Gen4x4 SSD, stick around. Silicon Power claim this drive can run at up to 7.3GB/s on reads and an impressive 6.8GB/s write too. It comes in either 1TB, 2TB or 4TB sizes, with good terabyte written ratings for each too, with 700TBW, 1400TBW and 3000TBW respectively. It even comes with a heatsink preinstalled which is subtle but effective.

Taking a closer look at that heatsink, you’ll notice that it is actually removable. It’s not glued on like some other drives, meaning if you would rather use your motherboard’s heatsinks that are now very common to find on boards, you actually can. It’s a bit of a pain to get it out but I appreciate Silicon Power putting the effort in. I do think I prefer the heatsink to be preinstalled if it’s going to come with one, although with so many boards now having heatsinks installed themselves it can make compatibility a little more frustrating.

With the heatsink off you can also see what makes up the drive – primarily a Phison E18 controller, paired with some good quality SKHynix DRAM as a cache, alongside in this case 4 256GB TLC NAND flash chips. You can see on the back side of the drive where the extra chips you’d get on likely the 4TB model would go, including an extra DRAM chip slot too.

Let’s get this in a system and tested – starting with some of the synthetic benchmarks. The important caveat to the performance you’ll see here is that this is the 1TB model, which especially for writing is often slower than the larger capacity drives. That helps explain why even in CrystalDiskMark, the program that always gives the highest, flashiest numbers, it could only muster 5.8GB/s – a full gigabyte per second lower than the quoted figure. The sequential queue depth of 1 results aren’t quite as high, with the rear numbers being under half that of the queue depth of 8 run. Compared to a similar drive from MSI, the Spatium M480, the XS70 runs almost 1GB/s slower here, although does excel in the random 4K tests by comparison.

When it comes to AS SSD, you’ll generally find the XS70 in the podium positions here. It’s generally the second fastest drive I’ve tested – and remember that this is the 1TB model, whereas the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is the 2TB one making for better write performance in particular. It’s closely tied with the MSI M480 1TB in my testing, likely thanks to both drives being basically identical in specs. There are a few slight discrepancies but overall it’s pretty close.

And in ATTO, the XS70 is in purple here and it’s almost identical to the M480. Seriously, look at its write performance – the two lines match almost exactly! Even the read performance is similar, and is mostly capped at the same level as the rest of the full fat Gen4x4 drives.

In my more real world stress test, duplicating 100GB fileset on the drive to stress reads and writes simultaneously, I am happy to report the XS70 ran at around 2GB/s for the first 200GB which is as good as I’ve seen from drives like the M480 and Rocket 4 Plus. It does fill up its SLC cache after that 200GB or so though, meaning performance dropped to more like 750MB/s average, but even that is a pretty healthy performance and that’s only when writing over 200GB to the drive at once. I can’t complain there.

So in short, this is a pretty good drive. I’m also happy to report that it’s listed for a pretty reasonable price too, right around what a WD SN850 or Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus would cost – often without their heatsinks either so that might make this an even better value. Obviously if you don’t need or want a heatsink, this does present a touch more setup fuss to remove the included one, but generally I’d say that’s better than some that just glue the heatsinks down. So yeah, solid recommendation from me, and as always there will be a global Amazon affiliate link in the description below if you want to check it out or pick one up yourself.