With the Silicon Power Velox V20 60GB SSD plugged in and us ready to review it, we couldn’t wait to see what the drive had in store for us. Identical to the rest of the pack, the SSD flaunts superior speed capabilities over traditional HDDs. And although solid state drives are destined to take place of the ones we currently have concealed within our PCs, are they really worth the high price? That’s exactly what we’re going to find out. Unlike traditional HDDs that utilize spinning disks to store data through movable read and write heads, an SSD contains no such moving parts and hence, allows the hardware to be compact and silent. Additionally, using NAND-based flash memory chips, SSDs provide faster speeds over the SATA interface.
Equipped with the SandForce controller, the Silicon Power V20 60GB SSD is stated to achieve speeds of up to 285Mbps in read and 275Mbps in write over the SATA interface. And in addition to that, the time taken for a computer to boot on any OS is claimed to be narrowed down to around 20 seconds. Weighing only 70g, the SSD consumes around 4.5V~5.5V and comes with the wear-leveling technology for an extended life span alongside the AES-123 encryption. Enclosed within a metal frame, the hardware sports a sturdy look, almost similar to most external HDDs. Also, supporting the TRIM Command and Garbage Collection technology, a drop in performance due to long period of use and continuous write actions is averted.
Straight out of the box, the neatly packaged SDD is accompanied by an installation guide that doubles as a warranty card, a set of screws and a bracket for securely mounting the drive. As a matter of a fact, that’s all you’re going to need to get the hardware up and running. Being 2.5-inches in size, the drive can be conveniently attached to any desktop within a few minutes. All it requires is a connection to a SATA port and a power cable within the PC cabinet. Measuring 100mm x 69.85mm x 9.4mm in dimensions, the drive operates between temperatures of 0-70 degrees Celsius which are pretty much standard for an SSD.
Anxious to know what the SSD is capable of, we’ve put the drive through a series of tests for benchmarking its actual performance and maximum speed derivable. On formatting the drive, free available space showed up at 55.9GB from a total of 60GB. To initiate our tests, we started off with the Crystal Disk Mark tool and managed to obtain an average speed of 250Mbps in read and 240Mbps in write, which is really decent. Despite our findings, we put the SSD through another test but, this time using the ATTO benchmark tool and to our luck, the drive peaked at an average of 280Mbps in read and 270Mbps in write, almost meeting the 285Mbps read and 275Mbps write mark specified by the company.
Although equipped with only 60GB of memory, the Silicon Power Velox V20 SSD has proven itself to be highly capable and is not to be taken lightly. Suitable for operations such as quicker startups of operating systems, faster gameplay and performance in applications that require serious speeds like the ones used in video editing, the drive is cost-effective, means it’s not going to burn a hole in your wallet. So based on our findings, we give the Silicon Power V20 60GB SSD a rating of 8 out of 10, keeping in mind its low power consumption, noise less operations, performance and stability.
