Six New SSDs: Can Intel Be Dethroned?

Silicon Power 64 GB SLC

Silicon Power has been active in various worldwide markets with memory and flash products. This time we received an SLC-based 64 GB flash SSD, which starts with a nice 179 MB/s interface throughput, restoring some hope that we might see a really great flash storage product. Although it is far from actually providing such a sequential throughput, we are somewhat happy with the 116 MB/s read throughput we measured. But the hope did not last long, as the drive failed to deliver its throughput promise on the write testing, where it was limited to less than 40 MB/s.

The drive is fast enough to take the second place in the streaming reads test, and to be strong in PCMark’s File Write benchmark, but it loses ground in the workstation I/O testing and our IOmeter test runs.

Low Power

We were happy with the power consumption numbers, though: 0.6 W idle power is an excellent result for the drive idle state. Peak power isn’t excessive either, at a maximum of 1.5 W, given that almost all other flash SSDs consume more power at peak loads. And the drive does well at providing a continuous data stream as well: we include a DVD playback power consumption test, where the Silicon Power 64 GB SLC SSD required a constant 0.9 W. Some drives require less power, but only two products are really low on power for video playback, while mist devices are at 1 W or higher.

Silicon Power says that there are multiple capacity versions between 8 GB and 128 GB, but only the MLC drives—which are specified to provide higher read throughput, but slower writes—are available at the top capacity number. The SLC models such as the one reviewed are limited to 64 GB for now.

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