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Silicon Power A80 USB3.0 Portable Hard Drive

A Closer Look

SiliconPowerA80 TechwareLabs

 Sleek blue exterior of the Armor A80 from Silicon Power

Features USB 3.0 connectivity – the latest Universal Serial Bus standard increases maximum transfer rate to 4.8 Gbps. Thats 10x USB 2.0!

SiliconPowerA80 TechwareLabs

SiliconPowerA80 TechwareLabs

 Meets the U.S. military drop-test standard
Waterproof and Shockproof design, includes sturdy dust cover for USB port

SiliconPowerA80 TechwareLabs

SiliconPowerA80 TechwareLabs

 Drive conveniently stores a short USB 3.0 Cable

Testing

So now lets put this portable drive to the test.  First the drive is connected to a USB 3.0 host controller featured on many of today’s newer motherboards (and available via add-in PCIe cards).  Our test tool of choice is a software application called CrystalDiskMark. It is a synthetic disk benchmark utility that measures the sequential reads/writes speed and random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed.  The results of these tests provide a good indication of disk performance.

Test Rig:

  • AMD Phenom II X4 965 Processor
  • GIGABYTE GA-785GMT-USB3 AM3 785G USB 3.0 Motherboard
  • OCZ AMD Black Edition 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 Memory
  • Western Digital Black Edition Hard Drive 500GB
  • NEC Electronics USB 3.0 Host Controller
  • Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with all latest updates and drivers
crystaldiskmark_50 crystaldiskmark_100
Test 1: 1 Pass / 50MB Test 1: 2 Pass / 100MB
crystaldiskmark_500 crystaldiskmark_1000
Test 1: 3 Pass / 500MB Test 1: 4 Pass / 1000MB
read_from_armora80
write_2_armora80

For a 2.5″ portable drive that is not limited by the interface connecting the external drive to the desktop system, performance is great. As for utilizing the 5Gbps of USB 3.0 bandwidth, not so much. With the use of a faster drive or better yet a Solid State Drive (SSD) this device’s combination of portability, USB 3.0, and rugged features would really shine. For the device as in, the performance is very good for the cost/GB and when considering all the extra features not readily available with many other competitors portable hard drives.

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5 Comments... What's your say?

  1. omid November 15, 2010 at 4:21 am

    I bought a80 but i find a problem for it, I couldn’t copy bigger file size such as 6 gigs up on it and shows error message in copy of file.(I have a enough space on it)

Trackbacks

  1. 1TB Portable Impact/Waterproof Hard Disk from Silicon Powerat $189 (Worth $289) says:
    March 15, 2012 at 5:32 am

    […] With an ample 640GB of storage ready to rock ‘n’ roll Silicon Power provides a storage solution ready to please. Not only is the hard drive capacity large and the form factor small enough to take on the road, the drive is waterproof and shockproof (3rd party tested) making this portable hard drive a cut above the rest.”- TechwareLabs […]

  2. 1TB Portable Waterproof Hard Disk from Silicon Powerat $189 (Worth $289) says:
    March 14, 2012 at 10:21 pm

    […] With an ample 640GB of storage ready to rock ‘n’ roll Silicon Power provides a storage solution ready to please. Not only is the hard drive capacity large and the form factor small enough to take on the road, the drive is waterproof and shockproof (3rd party tested) making this portable hard drive a cut above the rest.”- TechwareLabs […]

  3. 1TB Portable Armor Hard Disk from Silicon Powerat $189 (Worth $289) says:
    March 14, 2012 at 8:22 pm

    […] With an ample 640GB of storage ready to rock ‘n’ roll Silicon Power provides a storage solution ready to please. Not only is the hard drive capacity large and the form factor small enough to take on the road, the drive is waterproof and shockproof (3rd party tested) making this portable hard drive a cut above the rest.”- TechwareLabs […]

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