Today, we are looking at the Silicon Power UD90 2230 1TB NVMe SSD. Silicon Power officially refers to this drive as the PCIe Gen 4×4 UD90 2230, so I’ll just call it the UD90 or the UD90 2230 to be a bit shorter. This is the second in a series of reviews on M.2 2230 sized drives; the first was the Lexar PLAY 1TB. For those out of the loop, the 2230 (30mm) sized drives are physically shorter than their larger 2280 (80mm) brethren. Many devices use little drives like this, from small laptops to mobile game devices like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. I liked the Lexar PLAY, so I have high hopes for the UD90.
Silicon Power UD90 2230 1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD
The Silicon Power UD90 2230 1TB comes in a small, single-sided M.2 2230 (30mm) form factor.
Similar to the Lexar PLAY, this drive comes equipped with a Silicon Motion SM2269XT controller. When I reviewed the PLAY, I mentioned that I had seen this controller before paired with QLC, but the PLAY had TLC onboard. The UD90 2230 comes equipped with 176-layer Micron TLC, so it should be a relatively high-performance implementation of this controller. The SM2269XT is designed for DRAM-less drives, and indeed, the UD90 has no DRAM cache.
The backside of the Silicon Power UD90 has nothing on it, which is to be expected.
Silicon Power UD90 2230 1TB SSD Specs
The Silicon Power UD90 2230 is available at 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacity points.
The 1TB model has specified 4900 MB/s read and 3200 MB/s sequential write speeds, which are very conservative ratings for this drive. The PLAY had significantly higher published specifications with remarkably similar base hardware. Devices like the Steam Deck would focus on read speeds and not write performance, making these specifications more acceptable given the target market. The rated endurance is listed by following through the link to this table. So the UD90_2230 1TB has 600 TBW rated endurance, which is perfectly in line for a 1TB drive. Finally, rounding out the specs is the industry standard 5-year warranty. Silicon Power is typically viewed as more of a budget or mainstream offering, so I am glad to see a 5-year warranty here.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD and confirms we are operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.4.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR5-6000 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Silicon Power UD90 1TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. This slot supports up to PCIe Gen 5 x4. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data, and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume. Special note: the M.2_1 slot on this board does not natively support 2230-sized drives, so I just rigged it into place. It does not affect my testing, but it was worth noting.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
