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Top Customer Reviews
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Beyond Expectations
By
GFunk303
on
February 27, 2012
Size: 1TB
Style: IPX7
Verified Purchase
[[VIDEOID:mo1S9TZI1WSHKZM]]I work as a Karaoke DJ and tend to keep all of my music on an external hard drive. The problem with that is people spill drinks and get clumsy around equipment when they're drunk. So, I decided to do some research and look for an external HDD that would be able to support the large volume of music and at the same time present me with the comfort and confidence in knowing I have an external HDD that will withstand "torture".
I ordered my A80 1TB HDD on February 13th and it arrived February 16th. So, right off the back their was a prompt and quick delivery of the product. When I opened the package I was very pleased to see the sleek, clean, ergonomic design but at the same time I could tell that this unit holds a solid quality feel. It comes with 2 USB 3.0 Super speed cables. 1 of which rests beautifully inside the side of the HDD case. Not only does the Silicon-Power A80 use the Asmedia AS1051 processor they are also one of the first USB 3.0 chipset certified manufacturers. Silicon-Power promises that this unit meets the water resistant standard and the U.S. military drop-test standards. I will run both the drop test and water test on video for this review.(COMING SOON)
Before I run the drop and water tests I wanted to run a Benchmarking test. So, I used HD Tach. Now remember, anyone running any benchmark tests must understand that the mileage depends on hardware configuration. Basically, what type of computer hardware and software setup you're running.
I'm running:
Windows 7 Ultimate Service pack 1 32Bit OS
2.67 GHz Intel Core2 Duo
ASUSTeK P5Q SE2 MOBO
4GB RAM
HD Tach
1TB Silicon Power Armor A80 USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive : AVG Sequential Read 89.2 MB/S
AVG Sequential Write 88.4 MB/S
Burst Speed 127.3 MB/S
The result of this test helps me see that this unit IS FAST!!
I did some further comparison to give people an idea of real time transfer rates.
5GB File size -> USB 2.0 External HDD = 14:05 minutes
5GB File size -> USB 3.0 External HDD = 4:25 minutes
It took about 3x longer to transfer a 5GB file using USB 2.0
My suggestion to anyone looking for a high quality and durable External HDD. Get the A80!
I'm 100% confident in the products Silicon-Power produces.
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Solid performer. Nice Design.
By
D. B
on
August 21, 2016
Size: 1TB
Style: Water Resistant
Verified Purchase
»I've been using this drive at work and home and am very happy with its performance and design. I have the 1TB model which when formatted in Windows using NTFS ended up being 932GBs.
»The outer casing consists of hard plastic and the green silicone material you can see in the photos. The green silicone is actually what is surrounding the hard drive inside, protecting it from drops and is how the 'suspension system' works. The green silicone also has a slot that goes all the way around which is used to hold onto the included USB 3.0 cable using 2 clips. The 2 plastic pieces simply screw into each other on each side using 4 screws. The USB port has a flap in the silicone to keep it closed and free of dust when not in use. There are also 2 openings on the bottom plastic part where 2 green strips come through and provide grip on whatever surface you put it on, preventing slips. Simple and effective design for protection, grip and convenience.
»There is no external powered needed for this, power it taken from the USB port on whatever device you are using it with
»Copying to and from the drive was speedy and I the speeds I received when running a speed test were about what I expected for a traditional hard drive over USB 3.0. I attached a photo of my results which were 120.0MB read and 115.8MB write for sequential writes. I'm not sure if Silicon Power wanted me to do this, but I did it anyways, I unscrewed the 4 screws to see what drive was inside. I know Silicon Power does not manufacture hard drives like Western Digital and Seagate do. I was hoping to find a brand name from one of the very few large drive manufacturers and I am happy to report I did. Inside is a 1TB standard Seagate laptop drive. Not some cheap white label drive, a quality brand drive. Good choice.
»I have not tested the ability to survive a drop because I am actually using this on a daily basis so I am being slightly cautious. I am however throwing it into a backpack filled with things and plopping it down on a desk multiple times a day, you don't want to treat any standard hard drive with moving parts too terribly, but so far so good, no problems with performance or any strange issues.
»Overall this has been a great drive for me and I recommend it to anyone looking for a more durable external drive to take on the go, if anything changes I will update this review in the future.
*I received this product at a discount in exchange for an honest review, I hope this review was helpful.
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Working as intended for PS4.
By
Amazon Customer
on
March 10, 2017
Size: 1TB
Style: External Hard Drive
Verified Purchase
I bought the 2TB version and it does work with the PS4 (current version 4.50). At first it said it didn't support it but after I restarted my PS4 it worked. Currently works as intended. There's 1.84TB usable after formatting. It took 19 minutes to transfer 3 games (118.3 GB) over from the internal hard drive to this external hard drive. Will update if anything arises.
Edit: It had been a little over two months and its still working as intended. To answer a common question:
It works out of the box. Literally just plug it into your ps4 go to devices under settings then USB storage devices. It should pop up under there, select it then it will say "Format as extended storage" and select that. The support for external hard drives is absolutely great. If you have a TON of downloadable games then you can simply just have multiple external hard drives and download all you games to them. Then you can just plug in the external hard drive with the game you want and you're good to go. I highly recommend looking up how to set it up if you are still having trouble. It is very easy.
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Not durable at all...
By
Mario
on
October 8, 2014
Size: 1TB
Style: Built in USB
Color: Black
Doesn't seem to me that durable. Over the surface, it looks like a well-built reliable product. I ordered 10 of these in June for my technicians and now three months later, suddenly they are starting to die one by one. So far 3 drives have failed in the past two weeks one after the other. The 2.5 in. drive inside the enclosure just stops spinning and won't work anymore even though the LED light comes on. Changed cables, tried different computers, different USB ports, etc. I understand that some times you might get a bad apple, but 3 out of 10 so far died and who knows how many more in the next few months? That's a 30% failure rate which is unacceptable. Looks like the company better issue a recall on these. They use Samsung Momentus drives internally and it seems like Silicon Power didn't do their due diligence to find out how bad these are. I am giving it two stars instead of one because of the nice rugged construction and the USB port is not the flimsy micro USB crap.
UPDATE 11/17/14: Just had another drive fail. This is the 4th drive to die. I found out it is the Samsung Momentus drive that just dies without warning and it doesn't spin up. The previous three drives that died were replaced by the company under warranty. Let's see how long they last. I am totally blaming this on the terrible Samsung Momentous drive.
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Unreliable
By
Amazon Customer
on
January 26, 2016
Verified Purchase
This is a little piece of crap. I have tried reformatting this thing a hundred ways to sunday, and still I run into the same issue. Originally it gave me no problem. I pugged it in and it ran. However, if you are not using this directly for approx. 10 min, it will shut itself down effectively detaching itself without ejecting. If I had it plugged in to work on some photos in Lightroom, but for 10 min I checked my email, I would receive an alert that it was improperly ejected. The more this occurred, the more problems I began to have with the computer recognizing the partitions within the drive. I go to the disk utilities, and I can see that the computer knows there is a drive plugged in, but it does not mount the partition that actually holds the files. I would run disk first aid and every time it would come back and say that the disk is unfixable, that I should back up what i can and reformat the drive. I did, many times, until I realized that it didn't help. Sometimes after running first aid and it saying the drive was unfixable, it would then mount and work fine, that is, until it ejected itself again. PLEASE, spend a little extra and get a more reliable drive.
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Works fine with one cable
By
Mike From Mesa
on
December 5, 2012
Verified Purchase
I bought this usb drive to use with my digital photos. I work on a laptop and, because I take raw digital images, I wanted someplace to store my photos off of my machine. The logical solution was, of course, an external usb drive but, since my cat loves to jump on my lap or on the sofa when I am working, I worried about the possible damage to the drive from sudden movements. This was my solution to that problem. After reading some of the reviews I assumed that I would need two cables, one for data and one for power, and that there would be two usb connections on the drive. So, first off, let me be clear about what is and what is not needed to use this drive.
This drive itself has only a single usb 3.0 connection. The cable that comes with the drive is a Y cable with two connectors for the usb connections on the computer, but only one connection on the drive itself. As I said, the Y cable has two computer connections, but the wires are not the same. The thicker one is for data and the thinner one for power. So, to check the drive, I connected the usb connection on the drive and then first connected the data cable to the computer. To my surprise the drive spun up and my laptop identified it as a Transcend usb drive even though I had not, at this point, connected the power cable. Since I was surprised I did some checking and found out that the drive worked properly without the power connection to the computer being plugged in at all. I then checked the drive with the Y cable with both connections and the drive worked properly. I then tried the drive with a spare usb 3.0 cable I had for some other usb drives and the drive also worked properly.
If I had read the documentation before trying the drive I would have seen that the second wire is only needed for some machines which don't supply sufficient power to run the drive itself. Others, like my laptop, work perfectly with only a standard usb 3.0 cable.
I tested speed transfers using both the provided cable, with both connections, and a standard usb 3.0 cable. I found that I had a transfer speed of about 63MB/s with both data and power connections and about 10% lower with only the single connection. Since I was transferring different data in the two transfers I cannot be sure that the difference was the power connection as it could also have been the different data. Fewer large files should transfer more quickly than more smaller files and that is what my testing was comparing. Given that I cannot even be sure that there is a difference of speed in the transfers. The speed I saw on my laptop was about the same as the other usb 3.0 drives that I have used with the same kind of file transfers.
In summary, not all computers will need to use both the data and power connections to use this drive. I assume stronger machines provide enough power to the usb connections to run this drive alone and that relieves my concern about losing this cable. Since some of the reviews I read on this product were misleading I thought I should quickly post what I saw when using this drive.
I have not had much time to use it so I am not yet sure it will continue to function properly and, because of that, I will update this review if needed. But my experience since the drive arrived yesterday afternoon is that the drive functions as well as any other usb 3.0 drive I have, transfers data as quickly and seems to be a lot more rugged. The ruberized grip on the drive is easy to handle and should prevent me from accidentally dropping it. As of this point I can see no reason to give this drive anything other than 5 stars.
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![Silicon Power 1TB Rugged Armor A80 IEC 529 IPX7 Shockproof, Waterproof 2.5-Inch USB 3.0 Military Grade External Portable Hard Drive - Blue]({"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81erOtpQgaL._SX522_.jpg":[522,522],"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81erOtpQgaL._SY355_.jpg":[355,355],"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81erOtpQgaL._SX466_.jpg":[466,466],"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81erOtpQgaL._SX425_.jpg":[425,425],"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81erOtpQgaL._SY450_.jpg":[450,450]})
