We’ve taken a look at rugged portable hard drives before and mentioned that there’s really a very special group of people that really want this kind of products. Other folks do enjoy the amount of punishment we give the drives though. We’re back with another rugged drive for everyone to check out, we’ve got the Silicon Power Armor A80 portable.
Silicon Power Armor A80 Features
- SuperSpeed USB 3.0 compliant and backwards compatible with USB2.0
- High transferring rate up to 5Gb/s
- Advanced internal hard drive suspension system
- Meet the water resistant standard “IEC 529 IPX7”
- Meet the U.S. military drop-test standards MIL-STD-810F 516.5 procedure IV (transit drop test)
- Anti-pressure and anti-dust function
- Cable carry design
- Easy Plug and Play operation – no drives required
- USB powered – no external adapter necessary
- SP Widget free download software features seven main functions to maximize your SP Portable Hard Drive
- Package Contents: Armor A80, USB Cable, Quick Start Guide & Utility Disc
- Patent Information: patent numberM391812, D138489
รย Closer Look
Performance Testing
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7 4770K
Motherboard:รย Biostar Hi-Fi Z87X 3D
Memory: Kingston HyperX Beast DDR3-2400
Storage: Kingston HyperX 3K SSD 120GB
PSU:รย BitFenix Fury 650W
Potential Performance
ATTO Disk Benchmarkรย benchmarks a driveรขโฌโขs read and write speeds with increasing file sizes and graphs them. This is the primary program that most storage manufacturer use in displaying their rated speeds.
Potential Write Performance
For potential write testing,รย HD Tuneรย was used to measure the driveรขโฌโขs write performance. Again, we focus on the average results for real-world relevance.
Crystal DiskMark
Crystal Disk Markรย is storage benchmarking software was developed by รขโฌลhiyohiyoรขโฌย of Japan, and is available for free. Crystal Disk Mark measures sequential, and random read/write speeds of storage devices.
Real-World Copy Tests
Weรขโฌโขve taken our compression test files, a collection of images, documents and other files ranging from 1KB to 50MB amounting to 3,310 files for 3.34GB and a single, large 12GB file. Weรขโฌโขre posting the raw transfer results for your reference.
Conclusion
The Silicon Power Armor A80 has been a long-standing model in the Silicon Power Armor series. So much so that there is literally countless numbers of torture test videos out there. We’ve already had samples pass us by and from personal experience, the drives are super solid and deceptively tough. If you still need a bit more convincing, here is the de-facto torture test video to show you just how incredibly well-built the Silicon Power Armor A80 is:
There are more of those in Youtube if you still need a bit of convincing. So let’s break it down: performance-wise, the Silicon Power Armor A80 is nothing revolutionary. Its performance sit between the lower-ranks of USB3.0 drives but still pack enough transfer speed to show get work done. Moving on to build quality, then this is where the Silicon Power Armor A80 stands out. Silicon Power for some reason felt the need to create something akin to the storage version of Captain America’s shield. Design may lack the flash as its simplistic, sapphire chassis hides the fact that this thing can stand up to being ran over by a car, torched and dunked in the toilet. So yes, in terms of looks, the Armor A80 has some good functional cues but nothing really impressive in terms of presentation unlike the ADATA’s DashDrive Durable HD710. To each his own though as some may prefer the more discrete form of Armor A80.
Coming in at $80 for the 1TB model and $140 for 2TB, its got a small premium over normal portable drives. Some drives will trounce it in pure read/write values but not a lot of drive can brag about being almost indestructible. That being said, the Silicon Power Armor A80 is, for lack of a better word, a specialized product aimed at a certain consumer group that have very specific requirements. That being the need for an extremely sturdy storage device.
To wrap things up, if your daily commute or work environment puts you in conditions where you need to carry data in a danger ecosystem, then a rugged drive should be there with you. Outdoorsmen, sports enthusiast, geologist, aquatic researchers and basically anyone exposed to non-standard environments where critical data protection also involves physical reinforcement then the Silicon Power Armor A80 is definitely the top choice for such a need.
Silicon Power backs the Armor A80 with a lengthy 3-year warranty. We give it our B2G Silver Award.
1 Comment
nice….