Silicon Power Armour A60: The toughest external hard drive you can get?

Have you ever heard of an American based hardware company called Silicon Power? No? Neither had I until recently!

Before I discuss the product, lets discuss the company. Silicon Power are a fairly popular company in the US to my knowledge selling products on Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg. In the UK however, the only site I've managed to find that sells their products is Amazon.

So, the A60, upon getting this product my expectations were not great purly because I'd never heard of the manufacturer, but I didn't judge the book by it's cover and held high hope for it. Getting my first hands on with the hard drive when I first unboxed it gave me a big shock as it seemed that the A60 had been manufactured very very well indeed.

After getting a good look at it, I could see why Silicon Power claimed it to be a very strong and "Military Grade" product. The plastic felt very sturdy, and the rubber edging felt very durable. After making sure the product worked properly on arrival with a few simple file transfers, I decided to test its toughness by putting it through some household scenarios that would kill some hard drives. Dropping it down the stairs, dropping it in the sink for 10 seconds, and dropping a 16oz hammer on it, and im happy to report that it survived! The only slightly flimsy feature of this design I found was the way that the USB cable is held on by two small plastic clips that slotted into the rubber outing.

Once I got to the conclusion that it had earned it's Armour name, I thought it would be best to see how it actually performs as a hard drive. The hard drive has USB 3.0 capabilities, and these were my results: Read 89.2 MB, Write 88.4 MB/S, Burst Speed 127.3 MB/S. Overall I was happy with these results as it makes file transfers not seem like such a massive procedure.

What do I use it for now? Well it's actually my expansion hard drive for my Xbox One, it holds most of my games apart from my most played ones, and I can't tell a difference in performance in comparison to the internal HDD.

But what about variety? Well you can get either a 500gb (£47), a 1TB (£61) or a 2TB (£91) so there is a good selection! (Prices courtesy of Amazon UK in June 2015).

Finally, does this product get my seal of approval? Well, there are cheaper alternatives out there, but not by much, so if you want a tough hard drive I'd definetly suggest taking a look at this one!