Silicon Power 1TB Rugged Portable External Hard Drive Armor A80, Waterproof USB 3.0 for PC, Mac, Xbox and PS4, Blue

I ordered this to replace a seagate drive that I owned for a few years. I tend to carry my drives in a backpack so I was looking for something that could withstand a little abuse. I researched different drives for quite a bit and overall decided on this drive due to the cost/gb, features, size, items that came with it, lack of bloatware, CNET review. PRO: - Compact and Small - Very Fast, transferred nearly 200gb of data in about 20 minutes - Havent had the chance to test the drop ability, dont really want to. CNET tested this though and had good results. - Given a secondary cord that is 18 CONS: - Short cord from size is just a bit too small, cant really fit into any usb effectively without making the drive get in the way. - Smooth surface MAY induce dropping of the drive OTHER THOUGHTS: - Many people complain about the drive emitting a high pitched whine. I have heard this, but generally, it only lasts for a second or two as the drive spins up. After that, I find that I do not notice any noise from the drive whatsoever. The whine itself is not really ear piercing either. Do not let this be a determination when deciding whether or not to get this drive. I am glad I didnt. - Had the drive for a couple weeks now. I may update this after about 6 months.

The Silicon Power A80 combined with a USB3 is an incredibly fast read/write drive. It is well constructed and so far totally silent in running. My reason for 4 instead of 5 stars deals with the software package. If you intend on using this as a backup hard drive you will probably end up using your own back up software rather than their downloadable SP Widget programs. I found it too limited on a number of fronts. With their software: you can not password protect just the A80 (you have to lock both your computer and the A80); there is no incremental backup option; there is no one button backup. After talking with their tech support who confirmed these were not possible on the A80 but were possible with some of their other hard drives, I dumped their software and used my own back up software. However I find this a reasonable trade off for the ruggedness of the A80. Hopefully down the road Silicon Power will offer a better full function back up software to use with this unit.

It is fast and has tons of space in a fairly small package. BUT - About once a day it exhibits unstable behavior that usually forces me to (temporarily) live without the data on the drive, or restart my computer. Im running it with a one-year-old HP laptop, and heres th feedback my computer gives me: 1. You need to format Drive H before you can use it 2. USB device not recognized 3. The drive or network connection that the shortcut refers to is unavailable 4. One of the USB devices connected to this computer has malfunctioned and Windows does not recognize it. 5. Unknown device needs troubleshooting 6. Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43) 7. Try reconnecting the device. If Windows still does not recognize it, replace the device. So far Ive gone to the manufacturers website to download drivers, and spent hours searching online for possible solutions - but to no avail. So, if you want an occassional-use drive to store some infrequently used files (and youre computer-savvy), this drive will give you bang for your buck. If you want access to the files on a regular basis, be prepared to restart your computer.

For the price, the data capacity is awesome. I am now on my 3rd 1TB drive. I will not buy anything that is not full sized USB, all my friends with broken HHD attachments have proven to me the major difference. I have owned WDs that fell over on the desk and they were sitting to become Dead paperweights. Not this thing, I do not treat it as nice as I should, I have three in my back pack, and they are beaten to death in AFGHANISTAN sand and heat. I have dropped at least 1 of my drives 3-4 times from 4-5 ft, no issues. One makes a slight hum that the other 2 do not, but until one fails, I am sure its just pointless noise. I have no intention of doing the water test, I am not that silly to test it for giggles. 1 Year of Afghanistan torture, and its still working. Another previous owner stated it fell off the table and broke, These Have a 3 YEAR warranty, it sucks to lose data, but get it replaced, and buy a second one to prevent important losses.

This is a great hardened USB drive! I have not bought 3 of them, one for my wife (who was overseas when her other name-brand external HDD failed), one for my daughter (who will be going overseas) and one for myself, to replace a drive that I somehow misplaced (huh?) The form factor is great, with the USB port plugged with a rubber stopper to keep dirt and water out, and best of all, a small cable that is stored in the side of the case itself! How handy! The mil-spec rating seems to be holding so far, as I have not had any issues with any of the drives. I have not benchmarked them, but with USB 3.0 (connected to a 3.0 port, of course), it seems pretty quick, at least twice as fast as my USB 2.0 WD drive, and faster than my WD USB 3.0 drive.

I needed this to backup my pictures & documents on a desk top that was in need of repair. This did the job and I was able to save everything to another computer witout any problems. Drive appears sturdy & I hope it lasts as good as it looks. The only thing I did not like about this drive was the USB cord stored in the side of the unit. The cord does not seem to fit or want to stay very well but other than that minor design flaw I absolutely love this external hard drive.

There are a couple of nice things about this unit. First is that it is a single connector drive. Not tried it in a USB2 plug, but with USB3, it works really well. Transfer speeds (moved 80 gigs initially of everthings from small jpgs to large video files) with a Windows 8 maching. Speeds varied from just over 1 gig per second (for small jpgs) to a small amount over 80 gigs/second for the larger video files. 15 meg raw photo files were around 50 meg/second. Not exactly sure what the limiting factor is here, but I have a really fast USB pen drive that records the exact same speeds, so I suspect the bottleneck is not the hard drive, but something in the computer. Nice that you get two USB cables (one short that stores with the unit and one longer one). Dont know how long it will last, but is very nice right now.

I purchased this a little over a month ago and it has treated me great so far! As pictured, the drive comes with a short USB cord (~4 in, end to end) that snaps into a side compartment of the enclosure. This is a really handy feature that allows me to just pack up the drive and cord together, without having to worry about wrapping it up for transit. The drive also comes with a longer USB cord in case it is ever needed. Another thing I like about this drive is that there is no pre-installed software. I believe the WD and Seagate external drives come with software that cant be removed (hidden partition?). This is as close to buying an OEM drive and external enclosure that you will get... plus the added benefit of the ruggedness. As much as I would like to test dropping or submerging this drive, I will trust the others that have done so, and hope I never have to find out if it is as rugged as advertised myself. I am using this drive with a Macbook Pro, so am unable to take advantage of the USB 3.0 speeds, but the drive is working great with USB 2.0. I believe it came formatted as FAT32 and I have since reformatted it to HFS+ without problem. I couldnt be happier with the form factor, ruggedness, and simpleness of this product.

I shoot photos for Getty Images and the Berlin based photo sharing app EyeEm. I currently use two of these particular drives in the field for backups. I really appreciate the fact that each one of mine came with two cords one a foot long and one a few inches that fits in the side compartment (redundant drives redundant cords etc.) Keep in mind its not IF but WHEN your hard drive will fail so if you are a serious person you know only 1 copy of your data is not a actual backup! Its just like a vague suggestion or ticking timebomb... I carry two of these drives and bungie them together in a bank deposit size tool bag with the cords, fits perfectly. In the field I copy my photos from one(not dual-because Im a FujiX shooter) SanDisk extreme pro SD card, to two of these Silicon Power drives, and one WD wifi hdd with a card reader that rips straight from the card. I do upload to the cloud, a private Google photos, Flickr pro account, and Amazon S3 bucket ASAP but I have 5 physical copies laptop, 3 drives, and SD card. When I return to my homebase a copy goes to the servers and I also make personal archival DVD backups. Search for a video by Angry Photographer if you want to learn how to keep your data secure he has the best, most honest and accurate information Ive seen anywhere on data backup. We trust that every hard drive will eventually fail and not outlive our data but they are a valuable tool to quickly and easily move large amounts of data... that being said I think this rugged little drive is very worthwhile and because of the price its not crazy expansive to have multiple easy to carry redundant drives! If you care to view my documentary photography of rural Nebraska , search for (shannonpatrick17 on EyeEm) and (Shannon Ramos/EyeEm Getty Images)

It seems to work fine out of the box, but being an elitist linux snob I had to format it and use ext4. I have problems when transfering large files from a linux guest running in vbox on a windows 10 host. Not sure where the problem is happening but I doubt it is the drive itself. I cant give it 5 stars because I have not drop tested it nor have a tested its water resistance.