- Back to homepage
- Related articles
  Related articles

Silicon Power P34A80 PCIe 3x4 M.2 2280 512GB SSD Review

Storage/SSD by stefan @ 2019-06-02

The new P34A80 SSD featuring the Phison E12 controller is quite speedy and performs great even if we are dealing with only 25GB of SLC cache out of the total NAND capacity. We would recommend it for installation in both desktops, laptops and if we do have the possibility, we could pair two of these in a RAID 0 configuration for even higher performance. The Toshiba BiCS TLC NAND is joined by 256MB of Nanya DRAM for tasks such as ECC, wear-leveling and the whole drive is backed up with a 5-year warranty, which makes you wonder if it does worth it to consider a HDD nowadays.

Packaging, A Closer Look

The P34A80 M.2 2280 SSD is a mainstream offering from Silicon Power, which aims on offering quite a bit of performance, while keeping the costs low. While the P32A80 model we have tested before did include a DRAM-less design with a Marvell controller which supported 4 NAND channels, now we are dealing with a Phison E12 controller with 8 channels. The product is shipped inside a tiny cardboard enclosure with a plastic window, allowing the potential customer to take a look at the drive without the need of unsealing the packaging:

Some more details on the product can be found on the back side:

The outside layer did house a transparent plastic mold, in which the SSD is held fixed:

On one side of the drive PCB we can spot its code name, total capacity, model ID but also the serial number:

The back side of the PCB does not have any components:

Removing the slim top sticker is an easy process and by doing this we could expose the separate components of the drive:

The Nanya DRAM IC holds a NT5CC128M16JR-EK code name and translates into DDR3-1866, with a capacity of 256MB:

The 8-channel Phison PS5012-E12-27 controller does support QLC, 3D TLC NAND and PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interfaces:

The TLC 3D NAND flash is manufactured by Toshiba, using 64 layers on a 15nm manufacturing process; this drive comes with a total of 25GB of SLC cache, which provides quite a bit of boost during normal operating conditions:

No comments available.

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.