Storage

Silicon Power SP P34A80 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD Review

It has been a couple of months since I had an M.2 NVMe drive in the office which makes today a joy. I have Silicon Power‘s SP P34A80 2280 M.2 NVMe SSD here for a closer look at some benchmarks. The drive is available with up to 2TB capacity, but it’s the 1TB version I have in the office.

Silicon Power SP P34A80

The SP P34A80 is a drive that is compatible with most modern systems thanks to its 2280 M.2 form factor. All that is required is that your motherboard or adapter supports PCIe-based drives. The SP P34A80 comes in four different capacity options, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB, which should allow close to anyone to get the wished capacity for their system.

Silicon Power built the drive with Phison’s E12 controller and paired it with Toshiba’s BiCS3 64-layer TLC NAND. Both are quality components which we’ve seen in other drives before. There’s also a DRAM buffer which helps with the speed boosts and also an SLC cache. The controller also features a RAID engine which helps when the drives are paired in such setups. The PCIe Gen.3 x4 drive also supports the NVMe 1.3 protocol.

Performance and Endurance

Now, Silicon Power doesn’t provide us with a whole lot of details in the aspect of performance and endurance – but we do get some information. The drive is rated for a performance of up to 3400MB/s when reading and 3000MB/s when writing sequential data. The random performance is rated at 500K IOPS when reading and 600K IOPS when writing.

There is no official endurance rating, but Silicon Power backs the SP P34A80 with a 5-year warranty. With that in mind, we know it’s a drive that should last us a very long time and one that the company has confidence in.

What Does Silicon Power Have To Say?

“Step Up the Game to a New Level of Responsiveness. The full capacity P34A80 takes high-end devices to a whole new level of performance and responsiveness. Supporting the super-fast PCIe Gen 3×4 interface, it reaches incredible read and write speeds of up to 3400MB/s and 3000MB/S leaving PCIe Gen 3×2 and SATA III behind by a huge margin and high-power users with nothing better to wish for. It’s the ultimate addition to your performance gaming arsenal.”

You can read more about the drive and its details on the official product page.