Introduction

Silicon Power is a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer founded in 2003. In enthusiast circles, they are well known for providing high-quality flash storage products at reasonable pricing. Silicon Power's various product lines include DRAM modules, SSDs, flash drives, and portable storage.



The Silicon Power PC60 is a highly cost-efficient, value-optimized portable SSD for those looking for the best bang for the buck, while still being able to opt for an SSD instead of a mechanical HDD. Traditionally, most large-capacity external storage has been based on hard drives, which come at very low cost per TB but have several drawbacks. First, since they are mechanical components, they are sensitive to shock—if you drop it, it's very likely broken. SSDs, on the other hand, are almost immune to external damage. Another plus of SSDs is that they don't use any mechanical components to transfer data, so their seek times are much lower than on HDDs, and transfer rates are higher, too.

Silicon Power's PC60 Portable SSD uses the USB 3.1 Gen2 interface to support transfer rates of up to 1 GB/s in theory; actual speeds will be lower. The reason for that is that instead of an NVMe drive inside, Silicon Power uses a SATA-based SSD with a Silicon Motion SM2259 XT controller paired with Intel TLC flash. A DRAM cache chip is not included for cost reasons.

We review the Silicon Power PC60 in the 1 TB variant, which retails for just $88, but it is also available in capacities of 240 GB, 480 GB, and 2 TB. Warranty is set to three years for all these models.