Silicon Power S80 SSD: A valiant but futile attempt

A new mainstream player

Competition is a good thing - for consumers. Not only does it encourage innovation, it also helps drive prices down. And the SSD market is now consumed by a great three-way battle featuring Samsung, Crucial and Toshiba. All three brands have their own NAND foundries and firmware development teams; and Samsung and Toshiba even design manufacture their own SSD controllers.

Even though the market is now dominated by these three big players, that is not to say that there is no room for other players. Based in Taiwan, Silicon Power has had a limited presence in the local scene, but it is a major manufacturer of all sorts of flash memory products including USB flash drives, flash memory cards, DRAM modules and more. The S80 one of their newer SSDs and it is aimed squarely at the mainstream SSD market.

Unlike Samsung, Crucial and Toshiba, Silicon Power doesn't have the means to produce its own SSD controller and NAND flash, so it has to turn to outside suppliers. And since the mainstream SSD market is so tightly contested, to ensure it has a competitive edge over its rival,s Silicon Power has turned to an unlikely source for its controller - Phison.

Phison has been building SSD controllers for over 10 years, but most of their early controllers were used in USB flash drives and flash memory cards. In the past few years, the company started making controllers for SSDs, but they saw little action as the early years of the SSD was dominated by controllers from Intel, JMicron and Indilinx. And truth be told, there are few viable  SSD controller solutions in the market right now. Lest you forget, Link_A_Media has been acquired by SK Hynix, and from what we have read, SK Hynix will only sell you a Link_A_Media controller if you agree to also use their memory. SandForce, on the other hand, has been acquired by Seagate and has been very quiet lately. This leaves us with Marvell, who has a tested and proven controller, but they provide only the silicon and manufacturers must develop their own firmware, which is no a simple task. This explains why many of the smaller players are turning to Phison - apart from Silicon Power, Corsair and Kingston both use Phison controllers in their SSDs.

Powering the Silicon Power S80 is the Phison PS3108-S8, an 8-channel controller that currently also sees action in the Corsair Force LS and the Corsair V310. This is paired with Toshiba’s latest 19nm Toggle-Mode MLC NAND, the same being used in higher tier drives like the OCZ Vector 150, AMD R7 and Plextor M6 Pro. The drive supports the SATA 6Gbps interface. It also has a thickness of 7mm, this means it will fit into most Ultrabooks with no problem. It comes in a blister type packaging and there's no accessories provided.

Test Setup

The Silicon Power S80 will be tested on our dedicated storage testbed:

• Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz)
• ASUS P8Z77 Pro Thunderbolt (Intel Z77 chipset)
• 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 memory
• MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
• Windows 7

Our revised benchmark ditches older benchmarks such as HD Tune and also includes an all new timing test to better evaluate the drive’s real world performance. The list of benchmarks used are as follows:

• AS-SSD benchmark 1.7.4739
• CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
• PCMark 7 (Storage suite)
• Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
• Timing Tests (Cold start, Reboot, Apps Launching)

Since the Silicon Power S80 is positioned as a mainstream SSD, we have included results of the SSD 850 Evo and SSD 840 Evo from Samsung as well as the MX100 and M550 from Crucial. These are the most popular mainstream drives in the market right now and the Silicon Power S80 will have to do well against them to stand a chance. All drives tested are 256GB in capacity or sport other similar capacities such as 250GB and 240GB variants.

Here is the list of drives tested:

• Silicon Power S80
• Samsung SSD 850 Evo
• Samsung SSD 840 Evo
• Crucial MX100
• Crucial M500
• Plextor M6 Pro
• Pleater M6S

Timing tests

The timing tests are our evaluation of how the SSDs will perform in real-world everyday situations, namely booting up from a cold start, reboot and launching applications. As for the applications used, we made the drives launch 11 applications from the Adobe CS6 suite of utilities simultaneously; they include resource-intensive applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Premiere Pro, amongst others. As a point of reference, a 7200rpm mechanical hard disk would take over 5 minutes to open all the applications.

We begin with our timing tests and the Silicon Power S80’s timings showed that it is one of the slower drives. Its time of 27.4 seconds to boot up from a cold start is only quicker than the now obsolete Samsung SSD 840 Evo. It was also one of the slowest drives to complete the reboot. Finally, its timing of 12.8 seconds in the apps launch test was the slowest.

PCMark 7 results

PCMark 7 is a benchmarking suite from FutureMark that evaluates the performance of Windows 7 machines. It tests a wide range workloads and aspects of the system ranging from computation, image and video manipulation and storage. We’ll be looking solely at the storage test here.

Moving on to PCMark 7, and the Silicon Power S80 recorded 5136 points, which was the lowest of the lot. If it is any consolation, the margin of difference between it and the next lowest scoring drive (the Crucial MX100) is not a lot - just 152 points or about 3%. However, the difference between it and the highest scoring drive (the Samsung SSD 850 Evo) is a more significant 447 points or almost 9%.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 Results

CrystalDiskMark is an easy-to-run and quick utility to use to gauge a drive’s performance. It measures sequential read and write performance and random read and write speeds of random 4KB, 4KB (queue depth 32) and 512KB data. 

On CrystalDiskMark, the Silicon Power S80 began brightly on the sequential read and write workload, and recorded respectable sequential read and write speeds. However, we noticed its read performance began to dip quite drastically on the subsequent 512k read and write workload, though its write performance held steady. Its performance continued dropping and by the time we came to the final 4K and 4K, 32 queue depth workloads, it was the slowest performing drive. On the 4K, 32 queue depth workload, the S80’s read performance was only a measly 148.6MB/s, whereas the other drives were all hovering around the 400MB/s mark.

AS SSD 1.7.4739 results

AS SSD is a benchmark that uses non-compressible and completely random data. What this means is that the drives using the SandForce SF-2281 controller cannot compress the data first, which takes away one of the strong advantages of this controller. Therefore, this is a useful benchmark because drives that use the SF-2281 controller or similar won't gain an upper hand.

The Silicon Power S80 began poorly on AS SSD. In its Copy Benchmark test, it consistently recorded the poorest copy speeds. In the other workloads, we found that its sequential read and write speeds were decent. And on the more intensive 4K and 4K, 64 threads workloads, we noticed that its performance would drop quite significantly. Read performance, especially on the 4K, 64 threads workloads, was exceptionally poor at just 159.44MB/s, which was only about 54% of the next poorest drive - the Samsung SSD 840 Evo.

Iometer results (Part 1)

Lastly, we put the drives through the rigorous grind of Iometer, with different workloads and I/O queue depths. We have chosen to show results from a queue depth of 1 to 5 as this better represents the workloads a typical consumer might face.

The Silicon Power S80 had been exhibiting poor read performance thus far, so it was surprising to see that it performed admirably on Iometer. On the 64k streaming read and write workloads, it was amongst the fastest drives. However, its performance took a remarkable turn for the worse on the more intensive File and Web Server workloads, where it was clearly the lowest performing drive. 

Iometer results (Part 2)

Finally, we look at the I/O response times for the workloads reported on the previous page. The Silicon Power S80’s response times for the 64k streaming reads and writes workloads were respectable. But on the File and Web Server workloads, they were expectedly poor. As we can see from the graphs, the S80 could be as much as 50% slower than the rest of the drives in those two workloads. 

Against overwhelming odds

As we have alluded to in the past, the SSD market is a tough one to succeed in. Being particularly price sensitive, brands without their own NAND foundries or controllers face an uphill task in competing against the dominant players led by the triumvirate of Samsung, Crucial and Toshiba. With no means of producing the components critical in an SSD, they have little control over design, innovation and pricing, and are often left vulnerable to the whims and demands of their suppliers.



Despite the challenges, smaller players in this scene have done admirably to adapt and find ways to offer value to their customers. And one of the ways these brands are adapting is to adopt new controllers such as the Phison PS3108-S8 that we see here in the Silicon Power S80.



From a performance standpoint, the Phison PS3108-S8 controller is not quite up to par with controllers from Marvell and Samsung. As a result, the Silicon Power S80's overall performance is below average. Sequential performance is respectable, but beyond that, performance tends to be poor. This poor performance is exacerbated by the fact that it is its read performance that is found wanting, and read performance is arguably more important for mainstream users, whose typical usage rely more on reads than writes.

As for price, the 240GB version of the Silicon Power S80 is priced at S$179, which is pretty much in the middle of ballpark for SSDs at this capacity point. It is neither the most affordable nor the most expensive. This does not bode well for it though, because of its lackluster performance, it needs to be priced very affordably to compete. However, there are a handful of other drives in the market that are lower priced and offer more consistent performance such as the Crucial MX100 and OCZ ARC 100. Since Crucial and OCZ (via parent company Toshiba) have their own NAND foundries, they are able to price their drives more aggressively. Worse, at S$179, it is priced squarely in the same price bracket as the formidable SSD 840 Evo from Samsung, which is a real juggernaut in the mainstream SSD market, thanks to its awesome combination of performance and price.



All things considered, the Silicon Power S80 can be seen as a valiant attempt to disrupt the mainstream SSD status quo. However, it is also ultimately a futile one. As we mentioned in the opening paragraph, having your own NAND foundry, SSD controller or firmware development team, is becoming increasingly critical to compete in this space. On the bright side, Phison has just recently announced a brand new flagship controller - the PS3110 - which could provide a glimmer of hope to brands desperately searching of a competitive controller. If the PS3110 proves to be a success, we could have an interesting fight on our hands. But until then, it is business as usual.

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.