Silicon Power Stream S10 750GB - Big and Fast

As the USB 3.0 standard has started becoming the norm, prices of USB 3.0 drives keep dropping and well, capacities keep increasing. Silicon Power is offering a new USB 3.0 drive called the Stream S10. It’s available in 320 GB, 500 GB, 640 GB and 750 GB versions, which is the one we’re reviewing today. Features and Design The Silicon Power Stream S10 750GB is a USB 3.0 spec drive. The S10 looks pretty sleek with a smooth glossy finished top and a matte finished lower half. This is definitely one of the more colorful looking drives around. The front of the drive has a small LED indicator, which isn’t too bright, but serves its purpose well. Sleek and light weight The connector for the drive is placed on the side of the drive instead of the back, like it is the case with most other external portable drives. The cable bundled with the drive is thick and sturdy. Silicon Power has bundled a carry case for the drive but there is no provision for the cable to be carried along with the pouch.  The drive doesn’t use any rubberised material, so it’s not the sturdiest feeling drive around. The use of plastic also makes the drive very light in weight. The Stream S10 uses a Toshiba hard drive. The USB connector on the drive is a proprietary one and not a mini-USB or a microUSB one. Proprietary port Performance Being a USB 3.0 drive, we expected the performance to be impressive. We started off with our usual synthetic benchmarks and we saw drive read speeds of 78.13 MB/s. Most drives based on the USB 2.0 specification peak out at around 35 MB/s, so this is definitely a big step up. Write speeds were also identical - a write speed of 78.87 MB/s.  Real world tests were equally impressive. We used 4 GB data sets to test the drive’s read and write speeds. The drive recorded write speeds of 93.09 MB/s and the same read speeds, as well. This was the speed for 4GB sequential data. We used a second set of data which consisted of multiple files totalling up to 4 GB. Write speeds for this data set took 1 min 23 seconds, which is an average speed of 49.35 MB/s, and is still pretty respectable.  Internal file copy test from one partition to another within the drive as expected were slow. Copy speeds for a single 4 GB file was 24.8 MB/s and 27.30 MB/s for the multiple data set. It has everything from faster speeds to a good storage capacity Verdict The Silicon Power S10 750GB sells for Rs. 4,750 which is a great price for a USB 3.0 drive of this capacity. The real world performance is excellent for a portable drive and there’s a massive difference in performance between a standard USB 2.0 drive and the Stream S10. In conclusion, the Stream S10 has a good capacity, performs really well and will not burn a hole in your pocket!

Technical Specs
Capacity	750GB
Interface	USB 3.0/ USB 2.0
Transfer Rate	Max. 5 Gbps (USB 3.0 Mode), Max. 480 Mbps (USB 2.0 Mode)
Speed	No Information
Cache	No Information
Physical Specs
Dimensions	134.2 x 78.8 x 17.7 mm
Weight	145 grams
Other
Bundled Software	No Information
Warranty	3 Year