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Review: Silicon Power |
Our introduction to Silicon Power was already
made, when I reviewed the Marvel M60 USB3 flash drive, and that first experience
of their products was very impressive. You can read the review here.
As I said in my previous introduction,
Silicon Power is a relatively new company which was founded in 2003 by a group
of enthusiastic engineers and experts in flash media. They describe Silicon
Power as a company that's passionate, creative, and hungry for success.
Silicon Power offer various storage
products, starting with USB flash drives, memory cards, RAM, Solid State Drives,
and external hard drives. You can take a closer look at their product line and
also find out more about Silicon Power simply by clicking here.
Silicon Power was kind enough to provide me
a sample of the Armor A80 external USB3 HDD. The Silicon Power Armor A80 series
comes in various capacities, starting with 500GB and reaching the maximum size
of 1.5TB. So let’s start this review and have a closer look at the Performance
of the Armor A80.
A first look at the drive and its specifications
Let’s start with a visual inspection of the
drive, and as we see the drive comes in regular packaging.
The front of the box is very simple, but
also very informative and has a plain but stylish design. We can see the SP
brand logo, and some more info, starting with the USB3 logo, then the info on
the model and the size of the drive. Moving over to the right hand side we can
see the hard drive, and on the bottom we can see some extra info on the drive.
Starting with the Windows 7 compatibility, the fact that it's water resistant,
and that it’s shock proof. One other thing that gets your attention is the fact
that the drive has passed the US military standard.
On the rear we get a more detailed view of the
sizes that the Armor A80 is available in, and the OSs that it can work with. As
we can see the drive is compatible with almost every major OS.
Looking
at the contents of the package and what the Silicon Power Armor A80 comes with,
we find the quick start manual, the 1TB hard drive, and two USB3 cables. One is
a normal cable that allows more freedom as to where you can locate your drive,
and the other is very small, as you can see from the picture above, which
allows it to be stored inside the case of the drive.
The
front of the drive is simple and only has the Silicon Power logo, it has a
metal chassis and a blue colour.
At
the back we see the size, various logos, and also the made in Taiwan.
A view of both sides of the drive, as we
can see there is enough room on one side to hold a small USB3 cable, so that no
matter what you will always have the cable with you. On the other side there is
the USB3 port.
When I opened the drive, I found a Toshiba
2.5” hard drive inside and also an Asmedia chip to handle the USB3 connection.
A
detailed view of the HDD
A
close look at the Asmedia chip.
Specifications
A first look at the specifications of the
Silicon Power Armor A80 as they appear on the official website.
Some additional info from the Silicon Power
Website.
Now let's start our tests with the FAT32
file-system...
