Storage industry might have started to be overrun by Solid State Drives and other forms of Flash Memory, but whenever you need cheap solution to store your personal music and movie collection, disk based magnetic storage is still your best friend. With capacities of up to 750GB available for as low as $100 and speeds fast enough to saturate the practical limits of the USB 2.0 interface bandwidth, there really isn’t much reason you should choose a USB Flash Drive over a portable hard disk besides the obvious physical reasons like size.
Of course a larger physical size also means larger storage capacities without impacting performance. Add protection features like Shock Resistance and Water Proofing like the Silicon Power Armor A70 to the package and you got yourself a pretty sweet deal. But just how well do these drives perform? Continue reading to find out.
Packaging and Design
Good package designs show how serious manufacturers are about their products. A well designed package is an important factor lots of buyers consider when shopping for stuff, and Silicon Power doesn’t disappoint here. Unlike most Portable Hard drive package, the ArmorA70’s box is large, and features a plastic see through window on the front whish shows you the contents of the box.
The real estate on the back and sides is fully utilized by highlighting the features of the drive in ten different languages. Inside the box, you’ll find the Armor A70, the User Manual, Warranty Card and the Software Disc which contains the SP Widget software package allowing you to do a multitude of things including backup and encryption from the convenience of your desktop. But I would have preferred to have that software suite preloaded on the drive it self because its pointless shipping a CD with a hard drive.
As for the design of the actual hard drive it self, the all plastic body doesn’t look and feel cheap at all, which is the case with most portable hard drives these days. In fact holding the drive in the hand gives you the feeling that it is rugged enough to easily withstand a fall – and it can, since it meets the U.S. Military Drop-Test standards to protect your data. And that isn’t enough, the Armor A70 can also take a dive – in water – as well and live to tell the tale.
There is an indented slot on one side of the drive designed to easily carry the connection cables. The drive it self can be connected using only one USB port on your computer, but for optimum performance, I’d recommend using the two way split cable included in the box and use two different ports on the rear side of your computer.
And just to prove how rugged the Armor A70 really is, here's a video I found on YouTube showing the drive being thrown, drowned and overrun by a sedan, and live to tell about it. (Sorry for the language though - I think its in Hungarian).
Specifications
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Dimensions |
139.45 x 85.7 x 18.1 mm |
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Weight |
250g |
|
Interface |
USB 2.0 / 1.1 |
|
Peak Transfer Rates |
480 Mbps (USB 2.0) / 12 Mbps (USB 1.1) |
|
Power |
5V DC (through USB cable) |
|
OS Support |
Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000; Mac OS 9.0.4 and above; Linux 2.4 and above |
|
Operating Temperature |
5°C to 55°C |
|
Storage Temprature |
-40°C to 70°C |
|
Available Colors |
Black / Red |
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Available Capacities |
250GB / 320GB / 500GB / 640GB |
Test System Setup
|
Hardware Platform |
|
|
Processor |
AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition @ 3.4GHz |
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Chipset |
AMD 790GX Northbridge, AMD SB750 Southbridge |
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Motherboard |
ECS A790GXM-AD3 Black Series |
|
Memory |
Corsair XMS3 4GB DDR3 1333MHz Memory |
|
Graphics Card |
HIS Radeon HD 5770 1GB |
|
Primary Hard drive |
WD Caviar Green WD6400AACS 640GB |
|
Power Supply |
ASUS U-75HA 750W PSU |
|
|
|
|
Operating System and Software Benchmarks |
|
|
Operating Sysetm |
Windows 7 64-bit |
|
Graphics |
AMD Catalyst 10.7 64-bit |
|
PCMark Vantage |
HDD Suite – 3 runs – 64-bit Executable |
|
HD Tune Pro 4.5 |
Disk Speed Benchmark, Access Time Benchmark, Random Access Benchmark |
I’m only using HD Tune Pro 4.5 and PCMark Vantage in my test runs because both of these combined cover almost every aspect of performance that matters. The tests were run with the hard drive connected to the rear ports of the board, and the only USB peripheral connected besides the hard drive during testing was the mouse.
Benchmark – HD Tune Pro Disk Speed
HD Tune measures the speeds on the entire disk surface to give you an idea of performance is distributed according to the location of the data blocks. For hard drives, the data transfer rate on the outer tracks of the platter is read faster compared to the inner tracks because of the greater number of sectors.
As obvious from the chart above, the sequential access tests generally report a uniform performance in both read and write which is close to 27.3 MB/s and 26.2MB/s. The performance seen here is limited by the USB 2.0 interface, which like I pointed out in the Chaintech Apogee Astro 266X review is practically around 30MB/s to 40MB/s. Compare that to the speeds around 50Mb/s to 70Mb/s you’d get from most mobile hard drives by connecting them to a SATA 3.0Gb/s interface.
Here is the above data in the Bar charts for better readability.
Note that the burst rates are also pretty close to the average transfer speeds indicating a clear bottleneck of the USB interface. I’d like to see how this drive would have performed with an eSATA interface.
Benchmark – HD Tune Pro Disk Sequential Access Time
The access times of hard drives are dependent on a lot of factors including Seek time, Rotational Delay and Spin-up time. All these characteristics vary a great deal according to the location and the size of the data being requested.
Its pretty hard to tell read and writes apart in the chart above. That’s because Access times for both operations is virtually the same. In fact the average in both cases comes down to 18.6 ms, which is very decent for a portable 2.5” hard drive. Notice how the access time tends to increase as you get closer to the edge. A similar trend would have been visible in the transfer speeds graph on the previous page as well if the hard drive wasn’t being bottlenecked by the interface.
Benchmark – HD Tune Pro Random Access
Random Access takes the largest chunk of all the I/O based operations. Unfortunately, this is one department where hard drives really suck, and SSDs really tend to shine (for reads at least). HD Tune tests random access at various points on the disk using various transfer sizes and reports the operation throughput, access time and data rate for each. I’ve broken down these attributes into three different charts below.
As you can see from the charts above, random writes are far better in traditional hard disks compared to flash based memory.
Benchmark – PCMark Vantage HDD Suite
While PCMark Vantage might be considered a pure synthetic benchmark in most cases, its HDD test suite is an excellent tool to judge common real world scenarios. That’s because Vantage uses different workloads to mimic the access patterns of common applications like Windows Media Player, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Defender, and Windows Live Movie Maker etc. This workload provides a good estimate of the performance you’d get in related tasks.
Users looking to use the Armor A70 as a backup drive can breath a sigh of relief after looking at the chart above. The hard drive performs quite decently in tasks like photos, music and videos including editing. If you were looking to attach more storage to your NAS or Windows Home Server, then I’d bet you have found what you were looking for.
Conclusion
With prices of Flash memory dropping every couple of months, more and more people are considering getting SSDs as their OS and Application storage drives. While this might mean trouble for the traditional internal hard drives, Portable drives are actually going to benefit a lot from these developments because more and more people would be looking to augment their storage space to backup stuff which they can’t fit on their primary drives.
To take advantage of this situation, manufacturers need to strike the perfect balance among price, performance and features for portable storage. While widespread adaption of USB 3.0 might just be around the corner, their prices wouldn’t be as economical for backup purposes, nor would be their added speed benefits. In this situation, the Silicon Power Armor A70 seems to strike all the right chords. Its performance is close to the peak performance of the USB 2.0 interface, while it offers capacities as large as 640GB for a very reasonable prices.
Then through in features like Military grade shock protection and water resistance, and you’ve got yourself a drive which not only can be a good solution for your USB based NAS, but also a great travel companion. If only the drive would have come with an option to use eSATA as well as USB 2.0, this would have been one the best portable hard drives out there.
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