Silicon Power Armor A70 500GB

Full Review

The Silicon Power Armor A70 500GB is as portable as any portable USB 2.0 external hard drive. Except that the "Armor" in its name signifies considerable resistance to actions that would otherwise damage a normal hard drive.

According to Silicon Power, this drive can survive being dropped onto the floor, being left under one metre of water for half an hour, and pressure/vibration/dust-proof. Note that the goal is to have a HDD that still lives despite small accidents - deliberately subjecting it to extremes of these will kill it of course, like any consumer hard drive.

The goal is to have a HDD that still lives despite small accidents.

Design and Features
The model we received for review was red colored and with smooth edges, except for the sides where a black strip runs across. Since the casing is not glossy, fingerprints are not an issue. Oddly for a drive in late-2010, the USB connector on the drive's side is of a proper, full-USB kind, unlike others which connect over mini-USB.

Two USB cables are provided. One really short cable, presumably meant for connecting to a laptop, can be stored in the small ridge reserved for it at one side of the drive, when not in use. A longer, normal sized USB cable is also present in the package. This longer cable is a Y-cable with two USB connectors to draw power, in case you have an old PC that may not supply enough power to operate this drive over a single USB port.

Features bundled, include the mini-CD that contains the SP widget software. This lets you backup and synchronize data with the PC. It can also lock access to the PC, on the basis of a password or time. These software features of course, are in addition to the hardware itself that is "rugged" as described earlier.

Performance
To prevent bottlenecks, we use our top-end test-rig for testing. On synthetic benchmarks we measured a read speed average of 32.6 MB/s and a write speed average of 28.9 MB/s. Read and write access times averaged 17.5 ms and 8.2 ms (milli-seconds) respectively, with a CPU usage of 1 per cent on average.

Real world file transfer read/write speeds conducted when the drive was empty, showed a speed of 28.9 MB/s and 23.15 MB/s respectively for a single large file (6.42 GB), but fell as expected to 20.9 MB/s and 12.83 MB/s respectively, when copying multiple smaller files (1287 files totaling up to 2.33 GB). Transferring these small files from the first partition to a second one on the same drive (simultaneous read/write) was at a speed of 9.2 MB/s. To view these details in an easier table-based layout, take a look at the "Performance" tab of this review.

Internally, it uses a Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B 2.5-inch hard drive. As is usual for a 500GB drive, the actual available data storage capacity is 465.76 GB. This portable drive carries carries a warranty of 2 years from Silicon Power.

The rugged nature and additional software could have propelled this drive into our Top 5 Portable HDD list. So why did it not reach our Top 5 recommendations? Reasons include the price and limited availability in India. The distributor for Silicon Power products in India, seemed dis-interested in sales of the brand when we contacted them.

Bottom Line

The Silicon Power Armor A70 500GB portable hard drive offers a reasonably worry-free level of ruggedness. On the flip side, it does not look great or offer data transfer speeds that break the USB 2.0 barrier.

It is worth mentioning that a portable Seagate GoFlex drive of double the capacity, 1TB, can be bought at Rs. 5,900. So buy this Silicon Power drive if the premium price of Rs. 4,500 to you is made up by the software and a rugged drive containing valuable data.