14 DAY TRIAL // Ultrabooks and ultra-slim notebooks all have pretty decent storage devices nowadays, but just in case the SSD inside doesn't have as much space as you want or in case your model has an HDD or other, Silicon Power has released a more than decent upgrade option.
Called Slim S80, the drive is rather deceptively named. Sure, the “Slim” is easy enough to understand, but the rest doesn't do much to prepare you for what you're in for.
Then again, the capacity of 960 GB will never really be an easy sight to take in, not on the solid state drive market, where 256 GB are considered a lot.
Maybe in a decade or so, 960 GB SSDs and above will be a dime a dozen, but for now they are still rare and remarkable, if rather expensive even by NAND Flash standards.
Silicon Power didn't say what price the 960 GB Slim S80 SSD possessed or what tags the others in the same series would sell by. It did reveal pretty much every other bit of relevant info though.
The Silicon Power Slim S80 2.5-inch, 7mm-thin SSD
That's the first asset that sticks out, at least on paper: the thickness of just 7mm. It makes the newcomer more than suited for ultrathin laptops, ultrabooks included.
The connectivity interface is nothing to gasp at, since SATA III with its 6 Gbps is the regular configuration for these things, and desktop drives as well.
On the other hand, the Slim S80 does benefit from wear leveling, ECC technology (error correcting code), and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring system, which not overly long ago was only found in HDDs.
Needless to say, the Silicon Power Slim S80 boasts all the other natural advantages of solid state memory: shock and vibration resistance, low power consumption, noiseless operations (owing to no moving parts), and TRIM command.
Other assets include Garbage Collection technology, plus NCQ and RAID capability. All this in a package measuring 100 x 69.85 x 7 mm / 3.93 x 2.75 x 0.27 inches and weighing 39 g / 1.37 oz.
Pricing and availability
Silicon Power didn't include the specifics in its press release, but it did say the Slim S80 would ship in 32 GB, 60 GB, 120 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB capacities, besides 960 GB. Only the last one though, and perhaps the 240-480 GB drives, will reach top performance however, since speed depends on capacity in NAND devices.
The maximum read speed is of 555 MB/s by the way, while writing can be achieved at 480 MB/s. Of course, different benchmarks may return different results, and real life tests may not truly mirror them.