Silicon Power Armor A30 2TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive

Product: Silicon Power Armor A30 2TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive
Provided By: Silicon Power
Price: ~$114.99 Online at time of Publication

Introduction:

It's been over a year since we tested a mechanical hard drive of any kind. The move to SSD storage is going strong and with drives such as the Samsung 840 and Crucial M505 and MX100 drives actually quite affordable, mechanical drives are not as appealing as they used to be. If you are looking for a large drive though, mechanical drives still have the edge – but a long shot. The drive we are looking at today is the Silicon Power A30 2TB drive that will set you back a mere ~$120 – about the price of a 240GB SSD on sale.

For the same money as a 240GB SSD, you get eight times the storage and as we'll see in the review that follows, the performance on these drives is very decent. Silicon Power uses a Samsung Seagate Momentus 9.5mm drive that spins at a modest 5,400rpm and is a solid performer with a bunch of storage.

Silicon Power has a lot of different models of external drives and some of these even come with SSDs inside, but if you’re looking for a drive that is very pocketable and you need 2000GB of storage, this is a great option in their lineup. They claim it is tough as well, so we’ll be sure to test it from all angles.

The Silicon Power Armor A30 is a pretty basic piece of kit. It comes in a standard understated box that is very typical of Silicon Power. The box does have enough information on it to convince you that the drive should fulfill your needs and save your movie collection for use on the road. The drive comes with a user manual that should be pretty self-explanatory. Also included is a male-male USB cable that takes a bit of a deviation from the standard micro USB 3.0 cables that often come with external HDDs. While this cable is more proprietary, it should be a lot more durable and the connector is standard.

Bundle

First Look:

A closer look at the drive shows that it is a basic plastic enclosure and has silicon rubber corners that serve to protect the drive as well as hold the USB cable. There really isn’t much more to say about the drive at this point, but it looks like it should be able to take a bit of a knock or two and still keep the drive inside protected.

One thing that I do like about the drive is that it has a standard USB connector on both ends. While these cables aren’t as popular as traditional MicroUSB 3.0 cables, I do have a couple kicking around so they shouldn’t be too hard to find if you lose or damage the cable. This connector looks to be pretty solid and hopefully will stand up to years of use and abuse.

Drive Connector

On the next page we'll take a look at the features and specifications before we see what's inside and jump into testing.