In House Review - Silicon Power Slim S80 480GB SSD

[Ian]

CDRLabs has taken an in depth look at Silicon Power's new Slim S80 SSD. Weighing only 79g and measuring 7mm in depth, the drive is designed to be an ideal upgrade solution for ultrabooks and ultra slim notebooks. The S80 is powered by Phison's PS3108-S8 controller and is available with up to 960GB of Toshiba's Toggle Mode MLC NAND to deliver faster boot up speeds, shorter application load times and higher reliability than traditional hard drives. The drive is also shock and vibration proof, and is equipped with ECC and wear leveling technologies to enhance data reliability, extend endurance and ensure consistent data storage.


Silicon Power Slim S80 480GB Solid State Drive

[Ian]

As I was finishing up this review, I noticed that there was a firmware update available for Silicon Power's other Phison-based SSDs. The update is intended for the S55, S60, etc. but it works on the S80 too. The update is pretty big as it takes the drive from S8FM07.0 to S8FM08.0. Unfortunately, I have no idea what has changed. If anyone knows, let me know.

I rean a few quick tests with this firmware update. With CrystalDiskMark, the sequential read and write speeds are a little better. However the random write speeds drop a bit.

Silicon Power S80 CDM New Firmware.png (61.61 KiB) Viewed 11343 times

Unfortunately, the read and write speeds dropped with ATTO. When writing, it dropped by about 30 MB/s.

Silicon Power S80 ATTO New Firmware.png (25.44 KiB) Viewed 11343 times