Silicon Power XPower XS70 SSD Delivers Shark-Like Cooling And Packs A 7,300MB/s Bite
Call it aggressive styling or clever marketing, but Silicon Power's latest solid state drive sports a design that "breathes like a shark," the company says. Silicon Power is talking about its new XPower XS70, a high-performance SSD with a PCIe 4.0 interface to chomp through data transfers at up to 7,300MB/s, which is in the upper echelon of SSDs.
Point blank, this is one of the fastest SSDs on the market, at least according to the rated specifications. We haven't tested this model yet and so we can't say if real-world performance matches the company's claims. But in addition to purportedly offering up to 7,300MB/s of sequential read performance, Silicon Power rates the sequential write speed at up to 6,800MB/s.
There are actually SSDs rated a little bit faster, but not many and not by a whole lot. Theoretically, the upper limit for an NVMe SSD on the PCIe 4.0 bus is around 8,000MB/s. We're probably never see that in PCIe 4.0 land, though, because of overhead. But consider this—it wasn't terribly long ago when SATA 6Gbps SSDs rocking 580MB/s read and write speeds were top of their class.
That's obviously changed with the advent of NVMe and faster bus protocols. And in fact we're in for another big speed bump once PCIe 5.0 models inevitably arrive. As it pertains to consumer desktops, PCIe 5.0 is only available on Intel's Alder Lake platform, though AMD will join the fray when Zen 4 releases.
Getting back to the XS70, another bragging point is compatibility with Sony's PlayStation 5 console, for those want to add more storage (it's easy—see our guide on how to upgrade your PlayStation 5 with a fast SSD). This requires both a certain speed threshold and physical size, all of which this drive meets.
How does the comparison to a shark play into this, though? It's mostly marketing, quite frankly, though Silicon Power does claim the specially designed heatsink offers some cooling advantages.
"Inspired by the gills of a shark, the XS70's unique heatsink design with carefully angled slits enables it to breathe during even the most intense gaming sessions. Heat easily ventilates out through the heatsink's gill-like slits to prevent overheating and maintain superior performance. The XS70 is not only as fierce as a shark on a performance level, but it can breathe like one too for longer and more stable gameplay!," Silicon Power says.
Make of that what you will. Silicon Power didn't mention pricing or availability, but did say the XPower XS70 will ship in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, each backed with a five-year warranty.
