INTRODUCTION

   After almost a decade in the consumer marker solid state drives have become mainstream and so with that in mind it's no wonder that the "compact" M.2 form factor has gained serious support by mainboard manufacturers and is now available in most if not all current models. Size however is not the only thing the M.2 form factor has over SATA and even PCIe since thanks to the latest NVMe standard you can now expect data transfer speeds exceeding 3000MB/s for read and 2000MB/s for write from some enthusiast and enterprise grade models. Still not everyone is willing to spend a good deal of money to get to those performance levels so many manufacturers have instead focused in releasing budget-friendly M.2 NVMe drives aimed towards casual users, gamers and even professionals. One such model is the latest Z280 M.2 2280 SSD by Apacer and today we're checking out the 240GB capacity variant.

   Apacer is a world-leading supplier specializing in the research and development, design, manufacturing, and marketing of industrial solid-state drives (SSD), consumer digital products, and memory modules. Since its establishment in 1997, Apacer has developed innovative products and services based on its commitment to helping customer “access the best”. Our customers include global distributors, equipment manufacturers, and retailers. We offer high-performance, high-reliability, and high-value memory modules and flash memory products for the industrial control market; for consumers, we design innovative digital storage and peripheral products for everyday use in the recording, storing, and sharing of digital data.

   For the Z280 M.2 2280 solid state drive Apacer decided to go with the PS5007-E7 Phison’s first NVMe Gen 3.0 x4 PCIe controller (supports TRIM, advanced garbage collection, static and dynamic wear-leveling, bad block management, SmartECC, SmartFlush, GuaranteedFlush, end to end data path protection and AES 256-bit encryption) which they paired with 15nm MLC NAND flash by Toshiba and an 128MB LPDDR3 RAM module by Nanya (almost like the Hellfire series by Patriot Memory). The Z280 M.2 2280 SSD is currently available in 120/240/480GB capacities and always according to Apacer it offers sequential data read performance of up to 2300/2750/2750 MB/s and sequential data write performance of up to 1450/1500/1500 MB/s (along with random write IOPS performance of up to 160.000/160.000/175.000). Apacer covers all models with a three-year limited warranty and reports endurance numbers of up to 175TBW (Terabytes Written) for the 120GB variant, 349TBW for the 240GB variant and 698TBW for the 480GB variant.