INTRODUCTION

   If you happen to travel a lot or if you just need to transfer large amounts of data to your office from your home (and vice versa of course) owning a high-capacity USB 3.1 Gen1 (USB 3.0 essentially) portable hard drive is pretty much the best possible choice (especially when it comes to system compatibility). Portable solid state drives are beginning to gain ground as well mainly due to their ability to max out the bandwidth of USB 3.1 Gen 1 connectivity (some go even higher by using Gen 2 compatibility) but it will be a very long time before they can even come close to the overwhelming price/capacity ratio offered by portable hard drives. Silicon Power has released numerous high-end rugged PHD's in the past (most of which have made it in our lab) and today we decided to test their brand new Armor A62 4TB USB 3.1 Gen 1 model which arrived here roughly 2 weeks ago.

   Founded in 2003 by a group of enthusiastic data storage industry experts, Silicon Power is committed to delivering outstanding product and service quality. Headquartered and with our own state-of-the-art production site in Taipei, we have become a leading manufacturer of flash memory cards, USB flash drives, portable hard drives, solid state drives, DRAM modules and industrial-grade products. As an international player with four branch offices around the globe, we continuously strive to offer the perfect data storage solution for all requirements of modern digitalized life. With a strong focus on combining innovative technology and award-winning design, we live up to our brand promise to reliably preserve and protect your most valuable data. Because memory is personal.

   Just like the rest of the Armor line of PHD's the A62 model features a rugged IPX4 water and scratch resistant enclosure (made out of hard plastic this time over) which is also shockproof certified (via an internal suspension system) for drops from up to a height of 122cm (USA military transportation test - procedure IV). Silicon Power actually makes two A62 PHD's currently the slim (14.9mm - uses 7mm drives) A62S model available in 1/2TB capacities and the "thicker" (22.8mm - 15mm drives) A62L which is available in 2/3/4/5TB capacities. Inside the USB 3.1 Gen 1 compatible enclosure of the A62L 4TB model Silicon Power has placed a WD Blue Mobile SATA III 2.5" 15mm thick drive (WD40NPZZ model) which spins at 5400RPM (features WD's IntelliSata and IntelliPower Technologies) and is equipped with 8MB of cache.