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Silverstone is a company that is known for providing high quality merchandise to support your computing needs. From cases and power supplies to peripherals and NAS solutions, Silverstone makes products to increase performance and expand, less than a decade old, they have made a mark for themselves especially in the high end case and power areas.

The package

Today we look at the newest USB 3.0 external storage solution. The SST-RVS02 is branded with Silverstone’s Raven series moniker, and advertises support for SATA 6G speeds. The back of the box features more specification predominantly in English, nine other languages are included to support world wide sales.

The package includes a see through window so one can view the faux carbon fiber finish that is on one side of the drive with a see through Raven symbol that glows blue and flashes when the drive is active.

Included is a dual port USB 3.0 connector to provide additional power. This may be necessary when hooking the drive up to USB 2.0 ports, however using the high power USB 3.0 ports on the test board and the Silverstone PCI-E card also sent for testing, it was unnecessary. It is better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it.

Pulling the enclosure from the package, the all black plastic device features no active cooling. Small holes in the sides of the device allow some heat to escape, high temp drives should not be used. Even the SSDs used in testing generated enough heat to warm the enclosure considerably.

The mini-usb port on the back of the drive is not alone, and a DC port is also here, no DC adapter is included and unlike most external power ports, no specifications are included around it. One can assume 5v at no more than 3 amps would be required to power the drive externally, it is not needed as USB 3.0 provides more than enough power to handle any drive that will fit in the enclosure.

Flipping the device over we have a piano black finish piece that slides off with the push of a button. The plastic construction and weak tab mounting points are adequate to hold the device together, if one expects to be swapping drives in and out of the enclosure often, leaving the back plate off would be recommended.

The top plate is not removable without damaging the device and complete disassembly is not possibly without ruining the product completely. Silverstone says that the controller is SATA 6G, however testing does not back up that claim.

It should be noted that despite theoretical speeds that USB 3.0 is advertised to read, reality is a different animal. These limitations effect USB 2.0 as well, so although the 5 Gbps speeds should not be believed, the up to 10 times faster is genuine. With USB 2 maxing out around 35 MBps, this puts USB 3.0 at around 350 MBps maximum effective throughput.

USB performance may also increase 15% or more when PCIE 2.0 is dumped for PCIE 3.0 as the 20% overhead will be reduced to about 2%.

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