Apacer has been in the PC hardware market for quite a while. With the rise of NVMe SSDs, Apacer has jumped onto the bandwagon and has launched their Z280 series of SSDs into the market. Arriving in two flavors, 240GB and 480GB, Apacer has a decent lineup for their Z280 series of NVMe SSDs. The Z280 is a 2280 SSD that is a widely supported form factor on modern motherboards. Coming at a price of $120 for the 240GB model, Apacer has jumped into the competition to show off what they have to offer. How does it perform? Let’s find out!
This is our first review of an M.2 NVMe SSD. The Apacer Z280 is controlled by a Phison PS5007-11 allowing it to reach read speeds about 2400MB/s reads as Apacer claims and about 1000MB/s write speeds.
The Apacer Z280 comes packaged as simple as your everyday box of dipped biscuits. It doesn’t get any simpler than this. There’s nothing inside the box, except for the NVMe SSD itself.
Pulling the drive out of the box reveals, what Apacer has used to make the Z280 240GB. Taking a close look at the drive, we could find the Phison PS5007-11 Controller along with four 15nm Toshiba MLC memory banks, each accounting for 60GB of data.
Benchmarks
After installing the drive into our system, we ran quite a few benchmarks to validate the claims. Here’s the numbers.
Test System
- AMD Ryzen 1700 @ 3.9GHz
- Asrock X370 Killer SLI
- 2 x 8GB Apacer Panther DDR4 2400MHz RAM
- Cooler Master MasterLiquid 120
- SuperFlower 650W Silver PSU
In addition to the Crystal Disk Benchmarks, we’d also like to include our benchmark results using Anvil Storage Utilities. Anvil Storage Utilities is a great program that reports the speed of your storage drive and the latency to access the data.
In our testing, once we filled up the drive over 50%, we found that the drive started to slow down in the write department. Reads continued to be consistent throughout or testing. Response times we’re pretty good as we see on most SSDs throughout the board. And our current data of SSDs would continue to populate as we get more SSDs to test.
We would really love to thank our sponsors, Apacer and Cooler Master for sponsoring some of their hardware to make this review possible.
Hopefully we’ll also change our testing methodology in the future as we get more chances to do so. Since we have another 240GB Z280 we’ll also try to RAID 0 these drives and even report back on. For $120, the Apacer Z280 is a great drive if you could find it in your region.
