In today's review we will consider another Silicon Power product. It is the Velox V20, high-performance Solid State Disk, characterized by a good balance between price and performance, SATA 3 Gb/s interface, 2.5" form factor and SandForce SF-1222 controller.

[VERSIONE ITALIANA]

From the first appearance on the retail market of the first solid state disk to date there has been a great evolution both in terms of pure speed performance both in terms of cost per gigabyte. SSDs have been going to a revolution through time, many companies have plunged in the design and manufacture of these drives, offering over time, solid-state drives more and more competitive and at a more accessible price.

Silicon-Power has several solid state disk in the catalog, in particular it now produces two types of series. The High Performance 2.5" SATA SSD Velox V20 series and the Mainstream 2.5" SATA SSD Extreme E20 series.

Today we're going to test the Velox V20 series, an SSD with very interesting features.

Silicon Power Computer & Communications Inc. was founded in 2003 by a group of dedicated specialists in International Business, Global Marketing, engineering and technical industry in data storage on flash memory. The company is committed to provide a good quality image of its products. Silicon Power has been recognized and well accepted by million users in over 100 countries and has become the largest producer of flash memory cards, USB flash drives, card readers, DRAM modules, solid state drives and portable hard drives in less than a decade.

Headquartered in Taipei, the company has continually established various locations around the world, including Holland, Japan, Russia, China and other emerging markets to reach the market around the world. Silicon Power has gradually developed a world-wide attention to the overall performance.

In 2006 it received the Rising Star Award for Taiwan's success in foreign affairs. In 2008, it won the 17th National Outstanding Small & Medium Enterprise Award for exceptional progress. In addition, with superior quality and innovative design, their products have excelled in various competitions and were awarded the Taiwan Excellence and COMPUTEX Design Innovation Award in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

The main goal is to win the confidence of global consumers. In fact, Silicon Power has a record of successive double-digit growth in sales figure over the past seven years. According to the magazine "Common Wealth Magazine's 2010 Survey of Taiwan", the growth rate of sales in 2009 was ranked eleventh among the top 1000 manufacturers in Taiwan and also ranked first in the semiconductor industry.

Suitable for enthusiast, creative and hungry for success, Silicon Power introduces products for users who are looking for devices individualized, unique and for personal digital archiving. With the mission to create an unprecedented experience for users, Silicon Power is committed to providing a full range of high quality products that have an innovative design. The distinctly unique features and after-sales services complete the various services to create and meet the needs of consumers' personal storage.

The controller of the Silicon-Power Velox V20: the SandForce SF-1222

The SandForce SF-1222 controller, which equips the SSD by Silicon-Power is designed to maximize the performance of input/output per second (IOPS) than previous versions of the same controller.

The SF-1222 natively supports garbage collection function, i.e. the physical erasure of data even in operating systems and configurations in which you can not use the TRIM command, ensuring consistent performance over time. In the case of SandForce controllers, the garbage collection function was called Recycling and has been implemented in order to have less impact on the durability of flash memory.

Another important feature is the technology called DuraClass (of which SandForce is the sole owner). It integrates the DuraWrite functionality that optimizes the number of writes on flash memory and RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Elements Silicon), a function similar to RAID 5, allowing to increase the integrity of the written data and greater error correction.

These new features are not present in the old controllers, so you can ensure a long life of up to 5 times higher than the NAND memory chip SSD with previous or concurrent controllers. Other Feature offered by the SandForce controller are the Native Command Queuing, to rearrange at the best the order of execution of read and write commands to disk and AES-128bit encryption to allow data protection via password.

Thanks to S.M.A.R.T. sensors all the temperature of the disk can be monitored automatically and without any problem in real time.

The SSD also has two excellent features: the first, called ECC, allowing the creation of a report of errors and correcting them, all automatically, and the second, wear leveling monitoring eliminates frequent writes on the same flash cell prolonging its duration.

Obviously the Velox V20 fully supports the TRIM functionality/command of the Windows 7 Operating System, which allows for maximum optimization of performance of the disk being written.

http://www.sandforce.com/index.php?id=135&parentId=2&top=1

Silicon-Power V20 Velox: Packing and Bundle

Let us now analyze the packaging of Solid State Disk Velox V20 manufactured by Silicon Power:

The solid state disk is housed inside a cardboard box with a mostly black background. On the front is possible, through a window, physically observe the Velox V20. As you can see from the photos, the front, include some information in gold color, as the words of the V20 model, the form factor 2.5" SSD and the words that makes us understand that it is a solid state disk and not a normal disk. Of course there is the Silicon-Power logo and the words Hi-Speed, which reminds us that we are in the presence of high-performance storage device.

The back of the box highlights other technical characteristics of this model: the storage capacity, which in our case is 60GB, the Trim technology support, AES 128bit encryption and other information.

Once opened, we can see that the SSD is housed inside another clear plastic shield, all accompanied by the bundle. The latter includes an adapter from 2.5" to 3.5", which allows you to install the V20 in normal bays for classic 3.5" HDDs, a manual with instructions and finally the various screws that allow us to install the SSD in a correct manner. Some screws are used to secure the unit to the adapter, while others allow you to install the SSD in the cabinet where it will be housed.

Silicon-Power V20 Velox: SSD seen up close

Once you remove the SSD from its packaging, we see what the product of Silicon-Power looks like.

As you can see, the size of the SSD by Silicon-Power is extremely small and typical of 2.5" storage units. In fact it has a size of 69.85 x 100x 9.4mm and an extremely low weight of only 70g.

The chassis, which contains the SSD inside, is built entirely of aluminum. The painting, as seen for other products of this company, it's really well done and the color is matte black with clear coat finish. On the front there is a sticker bearing the logo, Silicon Power, the words V20 SSD, the 60GB capacity, the form factor of 2.5" and the various certifications to which it have been subjected, like the CE, RoHS, FC and D33B29.

Like all HDD with SATA interface, on one side we have two connections. A connection serves to provide the correct power to the SSD and must be connected to a power supply unit, while the other connection is used to transfer actual data, which in this case uses a SATA 3Gb/s interface.

As you can see from the photos, the device offers various possibilities for coupling. On the bottom indeed we have 4 holes for so many screws, while on the sides there are two more holes for a total of 4 fastening screws, especially the latter are used to insert it into the provided adapter from 2.5" to 3.5".

Silicon-Power V20 Velox: Technical Specification

The storage unit produced by Silicon-Power is a product with interesting features. Let's see them up close:

The V20 Velox uses a penultimate generation controller produced by SandForce, well-known company that is specialized in this type of product. In particular, as already seen in the analysis of the controller, this unit is equipped with an SF-1222TA3-SBH. This controller provides high performance compared to traditional mechanical disks but also compared to older first-generation SSDs. The company reports a value of only 13 seconds from the boot phase to a full Windows startup. The presence of Trim and GC technologies also allow to maintain its performance over time, and avoid the performance deterioration typical of the first SSD with old controller.

The SandForce controller guarantees, thanks to DuraClass technology, a much higher life expectancy than traditional SSDs. Moreover, as already shown in previous pages, we get an included adapter from 2.5" to 3.5" in order to house the unit in any cabinet at our disposal.

The PCB is equipped with well 16 flash memory chips, 8 on each side. Each chip has a capacity of 4 GB but, as you might guess, this way we go beyond the 60GB SSD offered by the unit, to be exact the exact amount of memory is 64 GB.

This difference between the amount of available memory and memory used is actually caused by overprovisioning technique, which dynamically allocates more space to replace the cells that are no longer functional.

NAND flash memory modules are classic FG-MOSFET transistor type multi-layer cell that carry the serial number Intel 29F32G08AAMDB. They are 34nm MLC, generally long-lived than the new 25nm chips.

We analyze the technical specifications of the Velox V20 Solid State Disk unit:

• Transfer rate: 285MB/s maximum read, 275MB/s maximum write
• TRIM Command Support
• AES-128bit encryption
• Available capacities: 40GB/60GB/120GB/240GB
• Conforms to the SATA 3GB/s
• 2.5" Form Factor
• Adapter from 2.5" to 3.5"
• Built in ECC to ensure superior data reliability
• Wear-leveling technology to extend the duration of the flash cells
• Meets European RoHS directives
• High resistance to vibration (20G peak-to-peak maximum) and shock (1500G Max)
• Full-quiet operation
• No seek error and delay of latencies
• Low power consumption
• Operating voltage: 4.5V ~ 5.5V
• Durability over 10,000 Pull/Plug Tests
• Dimensions: 69.85 x 100x 9.4mm
• Weight: 70g

Complete this excellent product a 3-year warranty.

Below you can see the screenshots taken from the properties of the operating system and screen made from HD Tune at the info section:

Note that HD Tune reported incorrectly the Average Speed ​​and Rotation Speed.

The test system and testing methodology

We tested the Solid State Disk drive by connecting it to a motherboard with the Intel Z68 or the Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD4-B3.

The motherboard is equipped with a 3.2 GHz Intel i7 2600K belonging to the second generation of Core architecture of Intel i7 series.

The complete configuration can be found in the table below:

To perform the test we used Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1, and we used the following synthetic benchmarks:

• HD Tune Pro 4.60 (reading and writing)
• ATTO Disk benchmark 2.46
• HD Tach 3.0.4.0
• Crystal Disk Mark 3.0
• AIDA 64 1.5

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1

CrystalDiskMark is a very useful software to measure performance in reading and writing sequentially (sequential) and random (random), with full support for NCQ (Native Command Queuing). In the last test the order of input and output is optimized to improve performance with a Queue Depth (file queue) of 32. This test allows to observe the behavior of the drive when transferring many small files.

The latest version of the program currently available is 3.0.1. Recall that in versions 1.0, 2.0 and 2.1 were found critical bugs so they are strongly recommended.

In normal mode we have an average of just over 200 MB/s using the sequential mode. Good performance in 4K QD32. In sequential mode the 0-fill results are close enough to those declared.

HD Tune 4.60

HD Tune is an utility for hard disks and SSDs with many functions. It can be used to accurately measure the performance of the drive, for errors finding, to check the vital status of the drive, to erase data securely and much more. The version we use is the latest available at the moment and it's 4.60. The program is available in two versions, a freeware (HD Tune) and a paid version (HD Tune Pro). In our case it was necessary to use the PRO version because it is the only one to measure the performance of the drive for writing.

HD-Tune emphasizes the performance in reading and writing for this drive that boasts excellent performance, considering the SandForce 1200 controller, which, remember, is not the 2000 series. Very good in fact, the behavior of IOPS, especially in writing.

AIDA64

Hungarian AIDA64 is a suite of more than 50 small software designed to test the status of our PC. Besides indicating the state of the operating system, motherboard, CPU and many other devices, it also allows you to perform benchmarks on the memory, the cache and the disks/drives. AIDA64 is available in two versions, Extreme Edition and Business Edition, both versions are freeware version, and once finished the trial period of 30 days many functions will be disabled if the product is not registered.

In reading, the Silicon-Power SSD performs very well, in writing, the AIDA test results were not exciting. As we have said, generally it is a behavior common to all SSD who adopt this SandForce controller, which has degraded performance with non-compressible data.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO is a free benchmark that executes simple read and write tests in batch mode employing a Queue Depth (files in the queue) of 4.

As you can imagine, the results we can see above, perfectly mirror the data declared by the manufacturer.

AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD Benchmark is another free benchmark specifically designed for SSD. It performs its synthetic tests without using the operating system cache that heavily influences the results of the transfer rate, it also determines the access time of the drive using the full capacity of the drive itself. All tests are carried out using non-compressible data.

As can be seen from the various screens made, the SSD behaves optimally after all, showing good results in the tests.

Conclusions

Performance:
Quality/Price ratio:
Overall:

The objective of this product is to offer the latest generation solid state disk drive with a good price/performance ratio and high temporal longevity.

As we analyzed this product, it is equipped with an internal SandForce controller of 1200 Series. Surely it is not the latest, but undoubtedly it is a controller that can offer good performance at an affordable price.

By contrast NAND flash memory modules, as seen in the previous pages, are the Intel 29F32G08AAMDB, built with 34nm production process, usually with more longevity than the new 25nm chips, but of course this affects the final price of the product, as the 34nm MLCs cost more than those built with 25nm manufacturing process.

The objective that Silicon-Power has set has been achieved without doubt. In addition to offering a product with a good price/performance balance, the Taiwanese company offers us a very tidy product in its construction and also aesthetically. The SSD has a pure aluminum chassis that provides protection over time and proper heat dissipation. Moreover, in a product with very affordable price like this, the company has also provided an adapter from 2.5" to 3.5", very useful, allowing us to install the Velox V20 in all types of cabinets on the market.

Velox V20 Series is available in various capacities:

The product we tested, costs around 90 Euros including taxes. Expense justified, as mentioned above, by the higher production cost of NAND flash memory chips.

The company has also warned us that new types will be available shortly with the latest SandForce 2000 SSD controller series. So stay tuned on our website, as soon as we will try them.

Gianni Marotta

Translated by Marco Comerci