14-Way SSD Hard Drive Roundup

Silicon Power SSD 128 GB: Big And Slow

Silicon Power may not be the first vendor to come into your mind when thinking of flash SSDs. The brand tries to create a buzz by providing high-capacity flash SSDs such as the test sample we received, which holds an impressive 128 GB.

However, the manufacturer seems to have forgotten to implement some performance, as the drive maxes out at 57 MB/s read throughput and roughly 30 MB/s for writes — both less than what a modern hard drive can deliver. While the 0.4 ms access time is sufficiently quick, power consumption isn’t special either — 0.9 W idle power is below average for a flash SSD, and the only number that pleased us was the peak power of only 1.7 W.

While the drive still does well in the File Write Performance benchmark of PCMark05, it loses ground when it comes to starting Windows XP, which involves locating and providing multiple small files. Since I/O performance isn’t impressive either, the Silicon Power 128 GB flash SSD remains a nice option for medium capacity ultra-portable PC solutions, as it is indeed acceptably efficient. However, don’t expect it to perform particularly fast.

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