[ The hype is high on these PCIe 3.0 SSDs.]
[Image credit: Apacer]
Apacer's marketing team gets an A for effort and enthusiasm in regards to the company's new AS2280P4U and AS2280P4U Pro model SSDs, which purportedly offer "cutting-edge specs that will rock the gaming market." But maybe a D minus for accuracy. Forget the market as a whole, these aren't even the fastest SSDs in Apacer's stable.
That's not to say they're bad—we haven't tested these models yet. But they're not on the bleeding edge of storage. Both are PCIe 3.0 models, with rated sequential read and write speeds of up to 3,500MB/s and 3,000MB/s, respectively. Those are fast in their own right, but not worthy of the tagline, "Being the best is just the beginning."
The fastest SSDs on the market have breached the 7,000MB/s market. Like Adata's XPG Gammix S70—it's rated to read data at up to 7,400MB/s, and write data at up to 6,400MB/s.
That's not an outlier, either. There are a few other PCIe 4.0 SSDs that are roughly as fast, such as Seagate's Firecuda 530, which is rated to deliver up to 7,300MB/s of reading performance and up to 6,900MB/s of write performance. And while Apacer doesn't offer anything quite that fast, it does carry a PCIe 4.0 SSD rated to hit 5,000MB/s reads and 4,400MB/s writes.
Anyway, while not cutting-edge (even within Apacer's own catalog), Apacer's new SSDs look like serviceable solutions if you ignore the marketing hype (one of the product pages touts "the latest generation PCIe Gen3x4 speed" as a feature). Both are offered in 2TB, 1TB, 512GB, and 256GB capacities, and both are backed by a five-year warranty.
What separates the two is cooling, The Pro model adds an aluminum heatsink to the mix, which Apacer claims reduces temps by up to 25%. In theory, a cooler-running SSD (and specifically the controller chip) will maintain peak performance for longer periods of time, before giving way to throttling.
There's no mention of how much the AS2280P4U and AS2280P4U Pro will cost or when they will be available, and they're not yet listed at places like Amazon and Newegg. As a point of reference, the 1TB WD Black SN750, one of the best SSDs for gaming, fetches around $129 on Amazon.
