INTRODUCTION

   USB flash drives have supported both consumers and professionals alike for well over 2 decades now but for higher capacity needs portable hard drives have always led the market. What happens however if you need the read & write data transfer speeds of high-performance USB flash drives and most of the higher capacities offered by portable hard drives? Well this is where portable solid state drives (SSDs) come in and even though they've been around for quite a few years now thanks to the somewhat recent introduction of higher available capacities they've begun to compete with portable hard drives (even though the latter still hold a much higher price/capacity ratio). Silicon Power recently released their PC60 line of portable SSDs and today with me i have the 960GB variant.

   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.

   For the PC60 line of portable SSDs (currently available in 240GB/480GB/960GB/1.92TB) Silicon Power decided to squeeze the DRAM-less Silicon Motion SM2259XT quad-channel high-performance SATA 6Gb/s controller and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash by Micron inside a small square plastic enclosure with USB 3.2 Gen connectivity. Needless to say, just like all the latest NAND controllers by Silicon Motion the SM2259XT also features their NANDXtend error-correcting code (ECC) with SRAM ECC, end to end data path protection, global wear-levelling, real time AES 256-bit encryption, SHA 256, TRNG and support for TCG Opal and IEEE-1667 (Microsoft's eDrive). Of course, the PC60 can't compete with M.2 NVMe based portable SSDs but it should still be a lot faster compared to portable hard drives so let's check it out.