14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that sports cars are really racing through the storage industry, leaving behind afterimages for portable storage drives, like the Silicon Power Stream S20, to take the shape of.
Nowadays, there are many portable storage drives out there, of both the hard disk drive and the solid state drive variety.
The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface is getting used more and more often, on both counts, what with its being so much faster than USB 2.0.
For hardware makers, this makes it hard to actually differentiate between all the existing products of that sort through performance alone, since there isn't much variation.
As such, the design has become quite relevant in one's ultimate purchase choice, something that Silicon Power appears to be quite aware of.
What the company did was create a series of portable HDDs whose casings have a look reminiscent of sports cars.
They are fingerprint-resistant and the unusual color (Purple) is guaranteed to turn heads more than so-called 'common' portable units.
500 GB, 640 GB, 750 GB and 1 TB capacities exist, all measuring 142.4 x 80.1 x 21 mm and bundled with a carry bag.
Weighing 160 grams or 210 grams, the transfer speed will be limited to 480 Mbps when on USB 2.0 ports, although, true enough, the maximum rate of 5 Gbps of USB 3.0 isn't likely to truly be reached even at full use. Then again, these aren't SSDs, so that is to be expected.
A three-year warranty is offered for each model and any system loaded with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 200 and Linux 2.6.31 or later should recognize them just fine. MacOS 10.4 or later are also supported, although but only at USB 2.0 speeds
Other assets of the Silicon Power Stream S20 include a LED power and data transfer indicator and a SP Widget free download. Prices are still unknown.