|
Silicon Power 32GB eSATA/USB SSD |
|
|
|
Written by Marko Nesovic
|
|
Wednesday, 01 April 2009 |
|
Page 1 of 3  On this year’s CeBIT many leading manufacturers announced that they will present (portable) eSATA SSDs during this year as step forward when it comes to transfer speeds. Silicon Power has complete lineup of these disks for some time with capacities that range from 8 to 64GB. These models have dual interface: eSATA and USB 2.0. In our test lab arrived 32GB model that presents the golden mean when it comes to capacity and price.
Disk came in cardboard box that contained miniUSB cable, short multilanguage manual and, of course, disk itself. There is no additional software on disk and it is initially formatted as FAT32 so if you plan to store files that are larger than 4GB, we suggest you to reformat it into NTFS file system. By its dimensions this portable disk is slightly wider and longer than standard USB flash disks. It is coloured black and at front side is eSATA connector that is protected with cap and at the back is miniUSB B type connector. Semi-transparent plastic body hides three LEDs (blue, red and green) that signal used connection and activity. Detail that cannot be overlooked is the fact that protective cap isn’t connected to rest of the device so “lost portable disk cap” scenario is very feasible.
If you, by any chance, on your desktop or notebook have eSATA (self)powered connector it is enough to insert disk into appropriate connector and everything will work right away. In case you don’t have powered eSATA connector it is necessary to use provided miniUSB cable and connect disk also to USB connector that will provide power for disk. In case you don’t have eSATA port, you can use miniUSB connector to connect it to USB port when you can expect slower transfers. Since most of configurations present on the market at the moment don’t have eSATA port you will most likely carry miniUSB cable always with yourself so you can use it everywhere.
Testing was done on ASUS P6Q3 Deluxe motherboard based on P45 chipset with ICH10R southbridge and results of our test you can observe in appropriate results table. As far as data read performances are concerned small oscillations are expected so there are no surprises in that department. When it comes to data write performances you can observe similar “drops” as we registered during test of Silicon Power SSD << http://www.insidehw.com/Reviews/Storage/Silicon-Power-2.5inch-Solid-State-Disk-64GB/Page-2.html >>. Everything is fine until we come at 20% of capacity when “performance drops” can be noticed. Obviously same trick is used for this eSATA SSD model: first 6.4GB is consisted of fast memory chips while for the rest are used slower and cheaper chips. If this is SSD that would be used as system disk, in notebook or netbook for example, these anomalies would be hard to notice in everyday usage. Since this eSATA SSD will be used for transferring large amounts of data this “feature” is not something that will be warmly welcomed and we count this as serious fault. Strange results that we got during HD Tach benchmarking for Burst speed (impossible values for SATA II connection that has limit of 3Gb/s or 386 MB/s) are most likely consequence of error in algorithm of this “old” application that, obviously, has problems with SSDs.
|
