Page 10 - Conclusion
Can we take the Silicon Power Slim S80 240GB at face value, or is there more to the story? Well, to put it into perspective, there is face, and there is value. In terms of value, the Silicon Power Slim S80 240GB is hard to argue against. For less than $90 at press time, this is one of the lowest priced drives in the 240GB to 256GB category. I would have easily have forgiven the company even if the drive came with no retail box at all. Surprisingly, not only did it come properly packaged with a nice retail box, Silicon Power did not cheap out on accessories either. Both a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter bracket and 9.5 mm spacer were included from the factory. With value in mind, we must also talk about face. If we are talking about 'face', as in what is skin deep, being rated at 550MB/s read and 500MB/s write is about as good as it gets for a SATA 6Gb/s drive. On the other hand, if we were to talk about 'face', as in 'saving face', then there is definitely more to the story. While the Phison PS3108-S8 performs quite well ostensibly in our synthetic benchmarks, everything pertaining to real life performance revealed the true limitations of this value oriented controller. Compared against other modern low cost SSDs, such as the OCZ ARC 100 240GB, Crucial MX100 256GB, and SanDisk Ultra II 240GB, the Silicon Power Slim S80 240GB simply cannot keep up. At the end of the day, we must evaluate our options. If you are absolutely strapped on cash, the Silicon Power Slim S80 240GB will provide you a multi-fold performance increase compared to any standard hard drive. However, if you have about $20 more, the SanDisk Ultra II 240GB is a much better performing alternative.
Silicon Power provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Silicon Power Slim S80 240GB is one of the lowest priced SSDs in the market today with a surprisingly generous bundle.
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Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 3.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 4.60
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 8.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark Vantage
10. Conclusion
