Final Score: 83 out of 100
The Silicon Power UD70 2TB is the drive the market has been waiting for since NVMe M.2 drives first became a ‘thing’. M.2 was chosen over the more optimal U.2 because of cost savings. Nothing more. Nothing less. That was how it was sold to drive and motherboard manufactures. Yet, somehow since their inception NVMe M.2s have been largely targeted at the enthusiast end of the marketplace. While some companies, typically backed by a NAND manufacture, have pushed the overall asking price down into cross-over territory… none were able to deliver on that underlying promise. Instead, those other drives offered great relative value… but you were still going to pay a premium over SATA options. With an asking price of less than $190 (USD) or a mere nine and a half cents per GB the Silicon Power UD70 2TB is not a ‘relatively good value’. It is a good value. It finally delivers on that marketing promise of ‘more for less’ and gives consumers a good reason to drop SATA and opt for NVMe.
The fact that Silicon Power, and not Intel/Samsung/Micron/SanDisk/etc. have done this just underscores how hungry they are for market share. Silicon Power has seen what others missed by shifting their focus to PCIe 4 offerings. That is to say PCIe 3.0 may no longer be able to command an enthusiast premium but is still a viable choice for many, arguably most, buyers. So instead of trying to beat them at their own game… they went back to the roots of M.2 and offered buyers what they really wanted. That is the UD70 2TB in a nutshell. It is a solid-state NVMe PCIe 3.0 drive that offers good performance, great capacity and does so while basically costing less than what a good SATA 2TB solid-state drive from Western Digital/Seagate/Samsung/etc. will. That is a bargain few can argue with… as less than ten cents a Gigabyte is not something even NAND snobs can (easily) ignore.
It is such a great bargain that even we do not even mind the fact that it is using QLC NAND and an older controller. In return for using QLC NAND, buyers on a budget get a rather surprisingly peppy drive that really does a great job at hiding the fact it is using ‘inferior’ NAND technology. Sure, if you manage to exhaust the pseudo-SLC write buffer speeds are going to sink like a stone… but that is tough to do. The latest Phison firmware combined with 2TB of capacity makes for a rather massive write buffer. More importantly performance is going to sink like a stone just like on any QLC NAND equipped drive on the market. What it will not do is sink your pocket book or your budget in the process.
In summary, if you are looking for a good deal, do not need it to be ‘the fastest’ PCIe 3.0 drive going, and do not plan on hammering it with more than 50% of the free capacity at one time, the Silicon Power UD70 2TB is a good option at a great price. Just understand the target demographics it was built for and the compromises required to hit its low asking price before you track one down.
The Review
Silicon Power UD70 2TB
In summary, if you are looking for a good deal, do not need it to be ‘the fastest’ PCIe 3.0 drive going, and do not plan on hammering it with more than 50% of the free capacity at one time, the Silicon Power UD70 2TB is a good option at a great price. Just understand the target demographics it was built for and the compromises required to hit its low asking price before you track one down.
