INTRODUCTION

   Although we see new products get launched all the time that doesn't mean that we have to discard old ones and the best possible example i can come up with are cars since i bet there's at least 1 really old car that each and every single one of us likes. So cars like the Pontiac Trans-Am (1982 model) which made its debut appearance in the Knight Rider as K.I.T.T, the Lamborghini Diablo (1991 model), the Ferrari Testarossa (1985 model) or even the Dodge Viper RT/10 (1994 model) which started in another series (called Viper, surprised?) may not have the assortment of electronics and comforts most cars now come with in their standard versions but these are cars that many people would give everything they have to own. Well the same partially applies to electronics and PC hardware as well and so although we've tested many of the latest SSD models to hit the market we decided to take one step backwards and test the Slim S70 240GB SSD model launched by Silicon Power roughly two years ago.

   Silicon Power Computer & Communications Inc., founded in 2003 by a group of enthusiastic specialists of flash data storage industry. Well dedicated in brand image and product quality, SP has been recognized and well accepted by millions of end-users in more than 100 countries, becomes the world’s leading manufacturer of flash memory cards, USB flash drives, card readers, DRAM modules, solid state disks, and portable hard drives in less than a decade. Headquartered in Taipei, we continuously established various branches throughout the world including Netherlands, Japan, Russia, Mainland China and other emerging market. With superior quality and innovative design, our products stood out in several competitions and awarded Taiwan Excellence and COMPUTEX Design & Innovation Award in 2009 and 2010. Winning trust of global consumers SP holds a record of successive double-digit revenue growth for last seven years. For SP, the product we introduced is not only a digital storage device but also a real promise to create and preserve your most valuable memory in every moment.

   The reason we decided to test the S70 240GB two years after its official announcement is because it was actually released along with the S60 but since availability was very low back then we were unable to get both samples here. We did however just recently and so much like the Slim S60 and the HyperX Fury model which we had here with us last week the Slim S70 is also based on the LSI/SandForce (Avago now) SF-2281 NAND flash controller that features several technologies such as NCQ (Native Command Queuing), RAISE (error correction, RAID like protection and recovery), DuraClass (advanced wear leveling and monitoring algorithms) and DuraWrite (up to 20x or more the flash endurance compared to other controllers) along with TRIM and intelligent garbage collection. The difference between the Slim S60 and the Slim S70 is located with the NAND flash modules used since unlike the first the second uses Synchronous Toggle MLC ones which should use less power and offer equal and even better performance. Whether or not the use of Toggle MLC NAND flash modules will make a difference or not is something we are about to find out in this review.