Silicon Power Armor A80 USB 3.0 640GB Portable HDD

CrystalDiskMark

Version and / or Patch Used: 3.0 Technical Preview
Developer Homepage: http://crystalmark.info
Product Homepage: http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html
Download here: http://crystaldew.info/category/software/crystaldiskmark

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software.

Key Features:-

* Sequential reads/writes
* Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes
* Text copy
* Change dialog design
* internationalization (i18n)

In a recent announcement the makers of CDM stated that they were making the 1000MB test the default benchmark, so we have changed over from the 100MB test and started using the 1000MB test in our reviews.

USB does not take advantage of NCQ so queue depths do nothing for USB 2.0 or 3.0 performances. Here we do get a chance to observe the 4K numbers. Just like in the STR testing we see lower performance than what we would have liked. This is a direct result of the drive chosen by Silicon Power to be used in the Armor A80.

To put this theory into practice, we removed the Samsung Spinpoint drive from the Armor A80 and replaced it with one of our Crucial / Micron RealSSD C300 256GB drives that were donated for testing storage products by Crucial. In the above CDM 1000MB run we see that the Silicon Power Armor A80 hardware is capable of handling up to 200MB/s read speeds. This shows that the Samsung Spinpoint drive chosen by Silicon Power is the limiting factor to the performance.