In the recent past we have highlighted two different Silicon Power storage series and walked away fairly impressed with Silicon Power’s design philosophy. While their execution is a bit less than optimal in some cases they really do focus on giving the consumer good options at various price points.
Unfortunately, as we have only looked at niche media card series this does not give a good overview of what storage options Silicon Power has to offer. Today we are going to remedy this as we have turned our attention to a more ‘mass appeal’ storage device that nearly everyone will be interested: the common USB external storage device. To be precise we are going to take a long hard look at Silicon Power’s hard disk drive based 4TB Armor A62 series.
External hard drives are about as ubiquitous as you can get with nearly every manufacture you can think of offering their take on what this rather important storage device should look and act like. With such market saturation this make choosing one brand’s model over another rather difficult as for the potential buyer it is almost like being set adrift in a sea of sameness. This however is the perfect testcase to see if Silicon Power actually does take their motto of ‘memory is personal’ seriously – as while there is uncountable numbers of options to choose from the good ones all share some things in common.
Basically, when purchasing external hard drive based storage we look for a few key areas. Areas that we know that help separate the wheat from the chaff. In no particular order these are robustness of the design, weight, performance, build design, protective abilities, overall aesthetics, price, and overall value.
With a quick glance at the specifications the Silicon Power Armor A62 does appear to tick some of these boxes nicely. With an asking price of only $120, or $30 per TB, the A62 certainly is within the grasp of most budgets. With military level certifications the robustness and protective abilities of the Armor A62 are also nicely covered. It is also a fairly attractive design that weighs less than 282 grams – so these are also appear to be covered nicely. Paper specifications however rarely tell the whole story so we will be paying close attention to these key areas to see if they do indeed tell the whole story.
However, without listed read/write specifications the key questions that we need to answer before passing judgement on the Armor A62 is on performance and overall value. After all these specifications appear to be a mix of Western Digital Passport (price) and LaCie (durability) – which is indeed an intriguing blend! As such the burning question is simple: is the Silicon Power Armor A62 worthy of your time or is it just another external storage device that offers nothing really special over more firmly established brands?
