An external drive that offers a substantial capacity and a degree of robustness
With the advent of faster USB standards and flash drives, external storage is incredibly popular, even if it can cost plenty to purchase larger capacity drives.
The Silicon Power A85 is a simple yet effective design that uses an extruded aluminium tube, capped at both ends in plastic to hold a 2.5-inch hard drive and protect it from the elements.
For those with a long memory, we first reviewed it in 2017 here (opens in new tab), and remarked on its robust nature.
This construction makes it remarkably resistant to shock damage and the ingress of dust and water that meet IP68 (but not IP69) standards.
A caveat to that protection is that if the A85 is correctly sealed, the most likely point of access for dust and water is the Type-A USB port, covered with a rubber plug when not in use. Therefore for it to have full protection, the cable must be removed, and the plug inserted.
Silicon Power doesn’t provide a carry bag or pouch for the drive and cable, so the cable will be floating around with a heavy drive in whatever holder you decide to put it.
And that cable is an issue because ones with a USB-A connector on both ends aren’t standard, and should it become damaged, replacing it would be problematic.
There is no USB-C adapter included, so those with those ports aren’t supported out of the box.
The final weakness of this design is that it uses a conventional hard drive that is more likely to fail if it is dropped than a solid-state mechanism, uses more power and has slow performance for both reading and writing.
These points are, to a degree, balanced by the impressively low costs of now up to 5TB of capacity, which is only a fraction of what an SSD drive of that scale would cost.
As part of the support provided for this product, Silicon Power has an SP HDD Lock utility that allows the contents of the drive to be password protected, except we couldn’t make it recognise the drive.
We might be wrong, but even if it did work it doesn’t seem to use a hardware encryption feature of the drive but a software equivalent.
The limits of this type of security approach are that once the drive is modified by the utility, it can only be accessed by computers that have the utility installed. Because without it, you can’t enter the password.
A working alternative would be to use Microsoft’s BitLocker functionality, as this is inherent on Windows 10 and 11 at this time.
Overall, this is a low-cost solution ideal for those that want to carry a large amount of data around that aren’t concerned about read-and-write performance or proprietary cables.
With the cost of NAND Flash currently shrinking, it might not be very long before we see external SSDs with the same or greater capacities and better performance than the A85 offers. But today, this looks like an affordable choice.
Using Amazon as a potential source for the A85, it’s generally available in most regions, but it is listed with 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB alongside the 5TB reviewed here. However, the smaller versions of the drive aren’t available, only the 5TB model.
The cost of around $165 seems reasonable, although Western Digital sells the 5TB version of this Elements external drive for closer to $100/£100.
