HD Tune Pro 5.50:
Next, I ran a series of tests using HD Tune Pro. This hard disk utility measures a drive's performance by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its access time, burst rate and CPU usage. For this review, I used it to benchmark the Armor A30's random read and write speeds, random access times and the number of operations per second.
 HD Tune Read Benchmark - USB 3.0 |
 HD Tune Read Benchmark - USB 2.0 |
 HD Tune Write Benchmark - USB 3.0 |
 HD Tune Write Benchmark - USB 2.0 |
Once again, the Armor A30 performed very well when connected to the computer's USB 3.0 port. The drive had average read and write speeds of 90.4 MB/s and 89.4 MB/s, respectively, and a burst rate of 141.4 MB/s when reading.
 HD Tune Random Access Read - USB 3.0 |
 HD Tune Random Access Read - USB 2.0 |
 HD Tune Random Access Write - USB 3.0 |
 HD Tune Random Access Write - USB 2.0 |
Using USB 3.0 didn't have nearly as big of an effect on the Armor A30's random read and write performance. Nevertheless, the IOPS and average speeds were, in most cases, higher than what we saw when the drive was connected to a USB 2.0 port.
"Real World" Benchmark:
To test the Armor A30's "real world" performance, I copied and pasted 500 MB worth of randomly generated files and directories. All of the files are between 10 bytes and 32MB in size and no more than four directories deep.
| Silicon Power Armor A30 | ||
| USB 3.0 | USB 2.0 | |
| Write: | 14 seconds | 41 seconds |
| Read: | 13 seconds | 23 seconds |
The Armor performed relatively well here, taking as little as 14 seconds to write our test data and 13 seconds to read it back.
