Silicon Power Armor A85 1TB Rugged USB 3.0 HDD Review

Test Procedure

Testing a drive like this is a pretty straight forward process. A mechanical drive does not have the same impact from wear and tear as solid state drives and as such the drive doesn’t require any long-time conditioning test. I’ll still be running extensive tests with various data fillage scenarios and benchmark applications.

First, I’ll test the drive empty after which I’ll gradually fill it with 25% data at a time and retest it under each of these fill scenarios. This will give us a detailed view on the drives performance as it fills up and whether that has any impact on the performance or not. For these tests I’ll be using the well-known ATTO, Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tools.

Following the fillage tests, I’ll be using AIDA 64 and IOmeter to get a more detailed view of the drive’s raw performance. These tests run best with an unpartitioned drive and as such exclude data fillage, but in return, we get even more details on the drive’s performance, including access times, sequential, and random performance.

Test system:

• Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 7-EU
• Intel Core i5-6600K
• EVGA GTX 980 SC
• Kingston Fury DDR4 2400MHz 32GB
• Samsung SM951 NVMe 256GB in RAID 0
• be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 850W
• Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate

Software used:

• AIDA64 Storage Benchmark
• Anvil’s Storage Utilities
• ATTO Disk Benchmark
• AS SSD Benchmark
• CrystalDiskMark 64bit
• IOMeter
• Windows 10 Pro