Features:
Silicon Power Armor series of drives are the rugged military tested drives and Armor A80 comes in a 640 GB capacity. It comes pre-bundled with the Silicon Power Widget and Norton Antivirus trial version. The SP Widget is a nifty little utility which you have to download from the net. It provides features such as My Documents Backup, Folder Backup, Data encryption, Email backup, PC Lock among other things which add value to the drives overall feature set.

Design and Build:
The Armor A80 drive is built like a tank and has undergone the stringent US military testing specifications. It comes in a sturdy casing and there is a small section to attach a small wire to the interface port. The socket to attach the USB 3.0 cable is thoughtful. Silicon Power have been sensible enough to provide an extendable wire to attach to the USB port. The drive is considerably heavy at 270 gms when compared with competing drives. But then again, that is expected considering that this is a rugged military tested drive. Even the USB port has a rubber covering, so that it does not lie exposed when the drive is not in use.

Test Setup:
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K @3.4GHz
Motheboard: Intel DP67BG
RAM: 2x2GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM @1333MHz (timing: 9-9-9-24)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
OS Drive: Intel SSDSA2H080GIGN (80 GB SSD)
RAID 0 Combination: 2 x 300GB WD Velociraptor
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6850
Power Supply: Corsair HX620W

Performance
The drive gives unformatted space of 596.17 GB. It gave a Read Burst speed of 180.4 MB/s which was slower than that of Hitachi Mobile Touro Pro which gives 182 MB/s. In the real world testing which involved transferring 4GB sequential and assorted files from the WD drive to the RAID array and back we got the following scores. Read / Write (sequential file) in MB/s – 90.02 / 96.06 and Read / Write (Assorted) in MB/s –85.47 / 74.67. This performance was slower than the Hitachi Mobile Touro Pro which scored higher in file transfer tests. It took 40.62 secs to open a 1 GB PSD file when used as a scratch disk.

Verdict
The Silicon Power Armor A80 not only is well built but also gives a very good performance. The only other external driver under 750GB that was better than this was the Hitachi Mobile Touro Pro 500 GB drive. The cost per GB despite this being a rugged drive is Rs. 5.8 as compared to Rs. 9.4 offered by the Hitachi Touro Mobile Pro. From a price point, this drive makes great economical sense as the performance is good enough.

Features:4/5
Performance:4/5
Build Quality:4.5/5
Value for money:4/5
Overall: 4/5

Price: Rs. 3,470