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The Slim S70 comes in a brightly colored box. Along with a picture of the drive, the front advertises many of its key features including its 240GB capacity, SATA III interface and 7mm ultra-slim form factor. The back of the box provides a bit more information, including the S70's specifications and a longer list of features. Inside, you'll find the SSD, mounting screws and a small installation guide.
Physical Features:
The S70 shares the same basic design as Silicon Power's Velox V70 series SSD. The entire casing is made out of aluminum. The top and sides of the drive are champagne gold in color and have a nice, brushed metal finish. The bottom of the S70 isn't nearly as flashy. Instead of brushed aluminum, Silicon Power opted for a plain, matte black finish.
The biggest difference between the S70 and the Velox V70 is the height of the two drives. Where the V70 is your standard 2.5" SSD with a height of 9.5mm, the S70 sports a new, ultra-slim form factor. At 7mm in height, the drive can be installed in ultrabooks as well as standard laptops and desktop PCs.
Like Silicon Power's Velox V30, V60 and V70 series SSDs, the S70 uses SandForce's SF-2281 controller chip. The SF-2281 can be found in a number of other SSDs including the ADATA XPG SX900, Corsair Force Series, OWC Mercury 6G, OCZ Vertex 3, Patriot Pyro SE, Kingston HyperX and the SanDisk Extreme.
If you've looked at Silicon Power's website, read their press release or looked at the box the S70 comes in, you've probably seen that the drive is equipped with "Toggle/Synchronous" flash. I find this to be a bit misleading as it suggests that the drive uses Toggle-Mode NAND when in reality it's using Intel's 25nm synchronous NAND flash chips. Looking at the pictures above, you can see that there are eight 16GB 29F16B08CCME3 synchronous NAND flash chips on either side of the PCB. If you do the math, you'll see that this equals 256GB and not the 240GB of storage the drive advertises. The SandForce controller uses this extra 7% (16GB) to maximize read and write performance and extend the endurance and overall reliability of the drive.
