Silicon Power T11 240GB Thunderbolt External SSD Review

TweakTown's Rating: 85%

The Bottom Line

The T11 is a solid solution and great entry into the Thunderbolt market for Silicon Power. The drive carries ample performance, great build quality and a decent price point.

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We have seen very few Thunderbolt SSDs come through the lab here at TweakTown, in fact I can think of just one previous so far, that being the Akitio Palm RAID.

With that said, today we look at Silicon Power's first Thunderbolt solution, the T11. The T11 is a portable SSD featuring Thunderbolt interconnectivity. Capacities for this solution include 120GB and 240GB with marketing specifications dictating 340 MB/s reads and 280 MB/s writes. Compatibility extends to Windows 7 and 8 along with OS X 10.6+.

MSRP of the Silicon Power T11 in the 240GB flavour is listed at $199.99 with a three-year warranty.

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Packaging for the T11 carries an image of the drive on the front. Capacity of the drive is listed along the bottom.

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Scope of delivery for the T11 includes a Thunderbolt cable, along with reading materials.

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The front of the T11 is rather elegant with its blue metal and white plastic design. The front carries the Silicon Power logo.

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On the edge of the drive, we have the Thunderbolt port. It's worth noting here that this drive carries a single Thunderbolt port so this is not a daisy chain capable solution.

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In our sequential testing, the Silicon Power T11 was capable of 363 MB/s read and 208 MB/s write.

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Moving over to our DiskBench testing, the Silicon Power T11 did quite well. In fact, it was the top drive in our chart. Here we have 344 MB/s with JPG, 291 MB/s with MKV and 298 MB/s with doc files.

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Price/Performance for the Silicon Power T11 put the drive at 86.5%, just ahead of the BP5 from MyDigitalSSD.

The Silicon Power T11 is quite a unique solution in that it's our first single drive portable SSD to use the Thunderbolt interface. It is also Silicon Power's first Thunderbolt enabled device on the market.

The build quality of this drive was quite good. The aluminum enclosure of the device adds a good amount of durability to the solution, while also acting like a heat sink of sorts, which you do need as this device does get pretty warm after extended periods of write operations.

Performance of the T11 was quite good as well, especially in our DiskBench testing with real data. In our sequential testing, we were able to meet marketing specifications for read operations with results coming in at 363 MB/s read, while writes didn't quite make the cut at 208 MB/s.

PRICING: You can find the Silicon Power Thunderbolt T11 240GB Portable External Solid State Drive for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.

United States: The Silicon Power Thunderbolt T11 240GB Portable External Solid State Drive retails for $188.95 at Amazon.

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