Silicon Power Touch 851 8GB

Full Review

In the trend of today's compact USB pendrives, the Silicon Power Touch 851 8GB "Crystal Disk" flash drive is a very portable storage solution indeed. The company has attempted a design that keeps it looking stylish while still looking different from other Silicon Power offerings already available in the market.

Design

The USB 2.0 connector is separate from the main body of this pendrive. The drive itself and connector still remain small enough that a "cap" for the connector would seem unusual, so that is not present. The body of the drive uses a pattern of checks and metal edges.

The review unit we received was a gold-colored one (silver colored is also an option, as noted in its release). Describing how the checkered design stands out in the gold coloured background, is best stated by saying that it does look attractive to the eyes, though it not seem the most photogenic design around.

As a bonus, the whole color scheme works well to not attract annoying fingerprints. Among peers that either have an attractive metal body or an unremarkable plastic body, the Touch 851 is a pendrive that manages both demands fairly well. The drive comes with a tag right out of the box, perhaps in a bid to reduce the chances of losing it.

Features
By default, there's neither a software CD in the package, nor applications present on the drive. But the website of Silicon Power does offer a free download of "SP Widget" and "SmartKit" software. This software provides some value-added functionality, such as data encryption, PC lock, and backup of folders/documents/favourites/emails.

After formatting, it offers 7.43 GB (GigaBytes) of actual usable space. Like any flash-based storage device, the Silicon Power Touch 851 8GB remains cool while in operation, since it technically cannot heat up! It is robust, in the context that dropping it to the floor or spilling water on it will not spoil it and data remains safe.

The drive is available in capacities of 2GB, 4GB, 8GB and 16GB. Silicon Power claims a lifetime warranty, while a Bangalore-based shop only offered a warranty of one year upon this product. Either way, this is not a concern with economical, lower-priced drives such as this one. For more details of the Touch 851 8GB drive, view the "Performance" and "Specifications" tabs of this review.

Performance
It is not meant to be a speed monster, and that shows, in tests. In synthetic benchmarks, read and write speeds averaged 29.8 MB/s and 8.7 MB/s respectively, with a CPU utilization of 2 per cent and read access times of 0.55 ms (milli-seconds) on average.

In real world tests, read speed average for both large and small files stood at 31.5 MB/s even across system reboots. This is along expected lines, as the limitation for external storage devices including pendrives today is the speed of the USB 2.0 interface itself. Also expected, is that write speeds diverge a lot from read speeds. Write speed while copying a single large file of 6.42 GB onto the drive stood at 8.83 MB/s. Copying multiple smaller files (800 files totaling up to 6.36 GB) onto the drive was at a speed of 4.15 MB/s.

Bottom Line

Silicon Power has a mini-sized USB flash drive with an attractive body that grabs attention. On the plus side, it is one of the few such drives that won't immediately look full of finger prints even before you've admired it. It is not one of the fastest though, and that is bearable considering that it is priced well.


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