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

This thing is great. I went on a trip for 3 weeks and took all my music, PDF e-books, Audio books, manuals for the camera I brought, itineraries, etc., and still had tons of space left. Got a converter cord so this would work with my phone so I didnt need to carry a tablet or laptop- just need a file manager app - no big deal. I liked that I didnt have to worry about it being fragile. Its a little heavy but that was a fine trade-off for all the space it saved me. I didnt have to carry around a ton of print-outs of my travel documents. Great for traveling light. I think that I am going to use this a LOT. It would also be good as a backup drive, extra hard drive space, or for moving files from one place to another.

My Product Review and Photos published @ UMLan dot Com! Check it out for more Details! Enjoy! Today, we have a product that we can compare ruggedness with the hummer in its unique tests. It is portable, small, and a beast to most people that are familiar with the HDD storage market. In this competitive market, the product does stand out from the rest because of its proven features. This little beast can endure water and physical abuse, where many just cant. UMLan would to thank Silicon Power for providing their all enduring show off portable hard drive which consists of a traditional 2.5 9.5mm 1TB hard drive inside, they call this little beast the Silicon-Power Armor A80. Most of us say Eh... Some of us say Wow! well let me break down some cool little features for some of you. As many and most enclosures, they are all the same, True! but what cant the rest do?! Most of us purchase HDD enclosures by design, features, and how cheap the enclosures are compared to in pricing. They all do the same but some may show differentials in Transfer Speeds and Design, the Armor A80 states one question and directly states it is a small battle tank, UMLan would like to Thank Silicon-Power for providing us the opportunity to test and try out the product, lets check out the details and performance tests. The benching software used are ATTO, CrystalDiskMark, HD TACH, and HD Tune Pro which has been included. ATTO benched @ 2GB file size, CrystalDiskMark @ 4GB file size, HDTACH @ 1GB file size, and HDTUNE PRO @ 40GB file size. Overall benchmarks resulted in the same average score and stability for most USB 3.0 transfer speeds, the sequential read and write levels @ 116/112 MB/s, Random 512KB read and write levels @ 36/39 MB/s, Random 4KB read and write @ 0.4/0.7 MB/s, and Random 4K + Queue Dept of 32 read and write for NCQ and AHCI levels @ 0.49/0.70 MB/s. Adding this storage device to my collection, I see that the Silicon Power Armor A80 can perform stably amongst most other portable hard drives in the market with a strong punch by adding additional rugged support for security during accidental physical and abusive damages even from liquid. Currently I am working on an introduction test video to reveal the Silicon Power Armor A80 Portable Hard Drive, the video will introduce to the product in addition to multiple endurance tests, physically abused!! Stay tuned!!! The Silicon Power Armor A80 1TB portable hard drive is just like all others in the market with additional rugged support regardless of being kicked around, drowned, and fully neglected. Through these overall abusive tests, the Armor A80 can certainly endure the wrath of my physical tests as you will see in the coming video. The overall performance resulted in transfer speeds relatively similiar and respected just like most others. Silicon Power uses the Asmedia AS1051 processor, which we can usually tell by now a days, those that are unfamiliar with Asmedia, they are one of the first few USB 3.0 chipset certified manufacturers in this technology. The overall design of this unit is fairly sleek, ergonomic, and holds a solid quality feel to the Armor A80. Today we thank Silicon Power again for sending over proof of what this portable hard drive can do as well as securing our data for the rest of our lives. Now, it all just depends on when the HDD will EOL, not the Armor A80s tough and rugged protective casing. UMLan would like to provide the Silicon Power Armor A80 portable hard drive a score of 9/10 for the following pros and cons listed below.

This hard drive looks decent, like the pictures. It is a bit heavy, which is to be expected from a rugged hard drive. The first one I received only showed up about half of the time when plugged into a USB port. I thought that it was a driver problem, but I tried it on 3 different PCs after installing the driver, and it showed up more and more infrequently. Finally after a month it stopped showing up at all, which was just beyond the amazon return period, unfortunately. I was able to receive an RMA number from the companys website, and I mailed the defective unit to Hong Kong (which cost about $12). About 2 weeks later I received a new (or refurbished?) drive, which seems to work well after the first couple of weeks. I was impressed that the company replaced the defective product with a reasonable effort on my part.

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.

When you hold this drive in your hand, you feel the weight of QUALITY. It feels like its meant to be thrown against a brick wall (dont do that though :D ). I coupled this product with a Drive Logic DL-64, then placed this in my safe. I feel like my backup data is invincible! Planning on buying a handful more of these in the future for sure. Have recommended this to friends and workplace and assisted some of them with purchasing this rugged drive. EDIT: 2015/1/24 Do not throw your rugged drive against a brick wall. Fortunately, Silicon Power is willing to try recover data + replace drive in warranty. If Amazon would let me, I would also include some photos of disassembly but I cant find the Add Photos button.

I picked this drive because of its military style ruggedness and of course its size. I used to carry in my bag external hard drives with much thinner casings and with the odd stuff I usually carry it has put dents in the casing. My first Silicon Power drive died on me after 29 days.......thank Goodness it wasnt 31 days. I exchanged it for a new one. This one seems to be holding up and I havent taken it on the road yet. I use it strictly as a back up for half of it and data for the other half. It has been sitting on my desk and so far is doing what it is supposed to do. I think it is an excellent drive. The interface probably died on the previous one. Hopefully it does not happen again.

I honestly do not have high hopes for this product. It was one of those out of a whim (and because of the price) purchases. My macbook was getting crowded with pictures and videos from all the photography & videography projects that I have... so technically even if if it works as described its a slight win win situation for me if it works. It arrived fast enough...decided to give it a hardcore test... copied all my files (photos & videos) straight from my macbook to the hard drive... Thinking it was gonna fail or going to be real slow, but to my surprise it passed my hardcore test with flying colors! The file transfer was speedy. It seriously is just plug and play (no additional tinkering required). I must say it was one of the best purchases that I had here on Amazon

I admit when I ordered my first Silicon Power Rugged Armor A80 1 TB drive I was a bit skeptical. A terabyte of rock solid rugged HD at this price? Powered by USB and fast? Suuure. But within a couple weeks I was ordering a new one. It is tiny, fast, exceptionally durable and runs off the USB drive. I am even using one on a 20 extension USB cable behind 2 splitters. It comes with both a short 3.5 inch cable that tucks handily inside the housing for storage and another that is a couple feet long. I just put the drive in my pocket and carry it with me back and forth to work. If I am near a computer I need to access, there I am, with the cable and no power requirements beyond the computers own USB. With a terabyte of capacity I have all the storage, transfer and backup I need with me wherever I go. These things have made my life a LOT easier. My hat is off to these folks.

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.

EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE. I wrote company, and within 10 minutes they offered a replacement or a refund. After reading many reviews talking about this drives toughness, I was very disappointed to learn this is not the case. Below is my letter to them. I bought this hard drive in January, then went out of town until May. I then copied picture and video files from my trip onto this drive. For the first time, I have tried to use it. I could not access one of the folders, so I had Diskwarrior run a test on it. It said that it had a disk malfunction and it could not repair it, so to copy the files somewhere else, immediately. This is very frustrating, as the whole marketing campaign around this drive is that it is very tough, but apparently it couldnt handle sitting in a drawer. I may have lost all the photos from this folder now. It is now very slow to content of folders on a Finder window (Mac). About 20 seconds per folder. I would like to exchange this one for a new one. I am leaving town again for three months on Sunday. What can you do for me? My address for shipping is... xxxxxx Once I receive a new drive, I will transfer over what I still can, and I would send back the faulty drive immediately, and you can see whats wrong with it.