Silicon Power P34A80 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 NVMe 1TB SSD
Closer Look at the Silicon Power 1TB P34A80
One of the main objectives of packaging is to provide potential buyers all the information they need upfront to make their decision as easy as possible. That’s precisely what Silicon Power have done by their simple yet informative packaging, which also gives you a glimpse of the drive.
Opening up the box, you’re offered the 1TB P34A80 in all its glory. However be aware that Silicon Power does not include a M.2 motherboard screw with the drive. So if you don’t already have one spare from your motherboard, you’ll need to get one.
The drive dimensions are 22mm x 80mm long in M.2 form factor and as long as your motherboard has the appropriate slot vacant you wouldn’t have any compatibility issues during installation.
The label on top of the drive shows the part number, barcode, model number and drive capacity which also acts as a thin metallic heat spreader commonly seen in M.2 SSD drives today.
Phison PS5012-E12 Controller
The P34A80 follows the reference design of Phison’s PS5012-E12 controller. While the reference design of the controller offers the following performance, Silicon Power have slightly tweaked the firmware that’s shipped out with this drive.
A pair of 256GB Toshiba 64-Layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND flash modules (labelled TABBG55AIV) are placed on either side of the PCB giving the P34A80 its 1TB capacity. There’s also a pair of 512GB SK Hynix DDR4-2400 ( 17-17-17) SDRAM modules placed on either side of the PCB giving the P34A80 a total of 1GB of RAM cache.
One could argue that one of the drawbacks of this design is that you can’t place a heatsink for the NAND flash modules on the underside of the PCB and causing thermal limitations to occur sooner. We shall see if this is the case during our testing. Alright time to see how well this drive can perform.
| Table of contents |
| 1. Introduction |
| 2. Closer Look |
| 3. Performance Results |
| 4. Conclusion |
Silicon Power P34A80 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD
AU$205
Pros
- Excellent Performance
- Value of money
- Long Warranty
Cons
- Thermal Throttling could become an issue
What is the average failure time – million hours ???
Hi there
Refer to https://www.silicon-power.com/support/lang/big5/TBW.pdf which will give you an idea on the TBW rating. There’s an good article here https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/storage-at-microsoft/understanding-ssd-endurance-drive-writes-per-day-dwpd-terabytes/ba-p/426024 to work out what that works out to based on the drive size you want to purchase.
Performance
8.5
Price
0
Warranty
0
Build Quality
0
Hi there. I bought a SP PCIe Gen 3M.2 2280 Nvme a80 1tb SSD but it has a black PCB. Is this a fake? I have looked everywhere and no one has black PCB s . Thanks
Hi Mircea
Do you have a picture of the unit? It’s hard to say the SP probably may have changed designs since our review. I could find out for you if required, however how has the performance been and hope you bought it from a legit source.