Silicon Power Bolt B80 USB 3.1 External SSD Review

Storage/SSD by stefan @ 2018-02-20

The Bolt B80 USB 3.1 External SSD from Silicon Power does sport a premium look thanks to the aluminum construction but is also easy to carry along. It comes with military-grade shockproof protection, but also rubber covers/gaskets in order to prevent water and dust penetration. For signaling data transfer activity, the product is provided with a white LED and its modular design along with the easy disassembly procedure does allow the user to replace the mSATA SSD with any other model/capacity.

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A Closer Look Contd.

The opposite side presents itself with two cut-outs, which do serve for fitting a possible lanyard:

 

 

 

On the bottom unit area, we can find a circular rubber foot; the total drive capacity is also written in the middle and in order to disassemble the unit, we must remove the six screws:

 

 

 

As we have seen with other high-end peripherals, the USB transfer cable is braided, while the connectors do follow the design style of the B80:

 

 

 

 

 

After removing the bottom aluminum cover, we will get to see the gaskets for vibration dampening purposes but also for keeping dust and water out:

 

 

 

Bolt B80 does feature a simple construction, with a mSATA to USB 3.1 Type-C adapter board and the mSATA SSD itself:

 

 

 

Thanks to the modular design, we can replace the supplied SSD with any other mSATA model, if desired:

 

 

 

 

The supplied SSD is a DRAM-less design:

 

 

 

This part is driven by a PHISON PS3111-S11 single-core SSD controller that supports technologies such as SmartECC, SmartFlush, GuaranteedFlush, SmartZIP, built-in static and dynamic wear-leveling, power saving features but also end-to-end Data Path Protection:

 

 

 

The NAND Flash ICs are from Micron and carry the NW838 code name; these are 3D TLC, so a drop in performance is expected after the SLC portion, which acts as a cache has been filled:

 

 

 

On the opposite side of the PCB, we have placeholders for two additional ICs (the 480GB version comes with these installed):

 

 

 

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