Apacer AS720 480GB SATA / USB 3.1 SSD Review

SKYMTL · Jul 7, 2016

Regardless of someone’s experience level, there is one question that constantly pops up when running through a general system upgrade: how do you transfer the data from an outgoing storage drive to a new HDD or SSD? In a perfect world, all systems (even UltraBook)s would come with two ports and it would just mean plugging in the new drive and letting a backup program work its magic. Unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world and many otherwise high performance systems simply don’t have the room necessary for more than one storage device needed to transfer critical system information. Needless to say this has led to many frustrating moments for a lot of people – ourselves included.

The usual system migration option typically boils down to pulling the original drive, installing it and the new drive in a secondary rig or use a USB-based adapter. Since very few users have multiple systems, option B is the most common solution. This issue is so prevalent that many SSD manufacturers actually have “upgrade kit” versions of their drives. Some like Kingston use USB enclosures, while others like Crucial include a special USB adapter that just plugs into the SATA power and data ports.

Both solutions do work, but because the kit versions cost more than the bare-bones models or the
With their AS720 Apacer offers a rather elegant work-around for this upgrade problem. Instead of including an external option, they have baked a very elegant solution right into the drive itself – and it is easily the best answer we have seen to date.

What Apacer has done is to create a drive that offers native SATA and USB interface options without the need for external controllers. This is not the first time we have seen a SATA/USB hybrid Solid State Drive, but it truly is a “World’s First” since Apacer has opted for a cutting edge, high bandwidth USB 3.1 Type-C port. The brilliance of this approach is that USB 3.1 is not only fast enough that (in theory at least) the bus won’t be the bottleneck, but dual headed cables aren’t needed since the interface provides more than enough power by itself.

Past the obvious benefits to folks transferring their system files, the AS720 could also be used as an awesome little external drive for on-the-go users. It provides that aforementioned high bandwidth connection and plenty of capacity without the bulk normally associated with and external drive. For videographers this could be extremely beneficial since they’re always trying to balance storage space with portability.

Now to be honest Apacer didn’t design this thing to win any speed contents. As a matter of fact, as far as SSDs go it is performance numbers sit within the lower level of the mid tier but you have to remember this product is all about situational adaptability, not speed.

This drive certainly represents a brilliant engineering approach, but no device exists in a vacuum and certain market realities have to be taken into account. Thus, this dual interface model will be competing against ‘bare-bones’ options and not everyone needs USB abilities. This means that in order to be competitive other areas beyond the feature set had to be scaled back so to keep the overall price in check.

The first and most obvious of these cost saving measures is the AS720’s chassis. Instead of an all metal case that has become the de-facto standard, Apacer has opted for a plastic and metal hybrid affair. OCZ and other manufacturers all abandoned this cost saving measure since some questioned the durability, and EMI shielding abilities of the design. Unfortunately, unlike most SSDs this model is meant to be used externally and as such using not only a plastic topper but a thin and almost flimsy feeling case is going to cause some potential buyers to pause before purchasing – even if the bronze plastic makes the AS720 look drop dead gorgeous.

After carefully opening up this plastic chassis it becomes evident that every inch of the full length PCB has been used, but in order to simply find room for another controller Apacer’s engineers had to limit the number of ICs this model could use to eight, instead of the normal sixteen. This in turn means more layers of NAND had to be stacked in each die and each IC will run hotter than some other models.

The AS720 also uses older Micron ‘L95B’ NAND rather than TLC modules like some of the competition. This 128Gbit, 16nm MLC NAND is very similar to what Crucial/Micron have been rolling out, and is supposedly quite durable.

The only minor hiccup here is the NAND’s relative speed. It is slower than what Crucial drives now come with, being rated for only 166MT/s and as such is a bit on the slow side. Luckily, the controller Apacer uses has built in pSLC capacities – or what IMFT calls 'FortisFlash' technology- so a small portion of the NAND is set aside to act as a write buffer in pseudo SLC mode. This not only boosts overall performance but increases the longevity of the NAND.

Also on the positive side, since Apacer has opted for a four channel SATA controller the layer of NAND interleaving is excellent (8 layers per channel). This combination means that the lack of individual NAND speed should be a non-issue for most consumers as the overall performance should not be noticeably impacted.

While we doubt the ASMedia ASM1351 USB 3.1 controller or the two ASMedia ASM1542 passive signaling switches (one is needed per interface) will ever get hot enough to require a heatsink, the lack of a heatpad on the JMicron JMF670 is a touch worrying. Once again this is because Apacer opted for a plastic enclosure that simply can’t be used as an effective heatsink. For the intended market this is a non-issue as most first time SSD buyers will never stress their system long enough for it matter, but it is rather obvious why other manufacturers stopped using plastic.

While JMicron is still trying to overcome their earlier reputation of offering relatively poor initial performance the JMF670 controller has gained a reputation for being both reliable and able to offerdecent performance levels. Arguably the newer SM-2256 from Silicon Motion has proven itself to be a more optimal and more widely used choice, but as ADATA and the XPG SX930 series proved the JMicron JMF670 still is a very good controller in its own right.

One thing that is puzzling however is why Apacer felt the need to cut the RAM buffer capacity in half. Usually with JMF670-based models the smaller 120 & 240GB versions use 256MB buffers and the larger 480GB is paired with 512MB. Apacer on the other hand only uses 256MB – via a single NANYA DDR3 RAM IC- for this larger 480GB version. This may impact overall performance at deeper queue depths and should not prove to be too big a handicap, but it still is a puzzling corner to cut.

Interestingly, while Apacer does talk about “Sudden Power Off Recovery” in their AS720 literature, this is not the same as saying this drive has true data loss protection as there is simply no room on the PCB for capacitors. Instead Apacer relies upon the JMF670’s built in ECC and other firmware based protections to guard against data corruption. Only you can decide if this is a deal breaker but we do consider it a big handicap considering other drives in this price range include hardware-based true data loss protection.

All in all the AS720 looks like an interesting drive that has a few unique tricks up its sleeve that will eventually differentiate it from the competition. But will that be enough?

SKYMTL · Jul 7, 2016

Test System and Testing Methodology

Testing Methodology

Testing a drive is not as simple as putting together a bunch of files, dragging them onto folder on the drive in Windows and using a stopwatch to time how long the transfer takes. Rather, there are factors such as read / write speed and data burst speed to take into account. There is also the SATA controller on your motherboard and how well it works with SSDs & HDDs to think about as well. For best results you really need a dedicated hardware RAID controller w/ dedicated RAM for drives to shine. Unfortunately, most people do not have the time, inclination or monetary funds to do this. For this reason our test-bed will be a more standard motherboard with no mods or high end gear added to it. This is to help replicate what you the end user’s experience will be like.

Even when the hardware issues are taken care of the software itself will have a negative or positive impact on the results. As with the hardware end of things, to obtain the absolute best results you do need to tweak your OS setup; however, just like with the hardware solution most people are not going to do this. For this reason our standard OS setup is used. However, except for the Windows 7 load test times we have done our best to eliminate this issue by having the drive tested as a secondary drive. With the main drive being an Intel DC S3700 800GB Solid State Drive.

For synthetic tests we used a combination of the ATTO Disk Benchmark, HDTach, HD Tune, Crystal Disk Benchmark, IOMeter, AS-SSD, Anvil Storage Utilities and PCMark 7.

For real world benchmarks we timed how long a single 10GB rar file took to copy to and then from the devices. We also used 10gb of small files (from 100kb to 200MB) with a total 12,000 files in 400 subfolders.

For all testing a Asus Sabretooth TUF X99 LGA 2011-v3 motherboard was used, running Windows 7 64bit Ultimate edition. All drives were tested using either AHCI mode using Intel RST 10 drivers, or NVMHCI using Intel NVMe drivers.

All tests were run 4 times and average results are represented.

In between each test suite runs (with the exception being IOMeter which was done after every run) the drives are cleaned with either HDDerase, SaniErase or a manufactures 'Toolbox' and then quick formatted to make sure that they were in optimum condition for the next test suite.

Processor: Core i7 5930K
Motherboard: Asus Sabretooth TUF X99
Memory: 32GB Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4-2666
Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780
Hard Drive: Intel DC S3700 800GB, Intel P3700 800GB
Power Supply: XFX 850

SSD FIRMWARE (unless otherwise noted):

OCZ Vertex 2 100GB: 1.33
Vertex 460 240GB: 1.0
Intel 7230 240GB: L2010400
AMD R7 240GB: 1.0
Crucial MX200: MU01
Intel 750: 8EV10135
Kingston HyperX Predator 480GB: 0C34L5TA
OCZ Trion 480GB & 960GB: SAFM11.1
AData XPG SX930 240GB : 5.9E
AData SP550 240GB: O0730A
PNY CS2211: CS221016
PNY CS1311: CS131122
ZOTAC Premium Edition: [FONT=&quot]SAFM01.6
[FONT=&quot]Apacer AS720: [/FONT][/FONT][FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w

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ontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w

ontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]-->[/FONT]PLD1130
[/FONT]
Toshiba TC58 controller:
OCZ Trion 480GB & 960GB - Custom firmware w/ 19nm Toggle Mode TLC NAND

Samsung MDX controller:
Samsung 840 Pro 256GB- Custom firmware w/ 21nm Toggle Mode NAND

SandForce SF1200 controller:
OCZ Vertex 2 - ONFi 2 NAND

Marvell 9183 controller:
Plextor M6e 256GB- Custom firmware w/ 21nm Toggle Mode NAND

Marvell 9189 controller:
Crucial MX200 - Custom firmware w/ 128Gbit MLC NAND

Marvell 9293 controller:
Kingston HyperX Predator - Custom firmware w/ 19nm Toggle Mode NAND

Barefoot 3 controller:
AMD R7 (M00) - 19nm Toggle Mode NAND w/ custom firmware
OCZ Arc 100 (M10) - 19nm Toggle Mode NAND

Intel X25 G3 controller:
Intel 730 - Custom firmware w/ ONFi 2 NAND

Intel NVMe G1 Controller:
Intel 750 - Customer firmware w/ MLC 20nm NAND

Phison PS3110 Controller:
Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB - 19nm Toggle Mode NAND
PNY CS2211: 15nm Toggle Mode NAND
PNY CS1311: 19nm TLC NAND
ZOTAC Premium Edition: 19nm MLC

JMicron JMF670H Controller:
AData XPG SX930 240GB - 128Gbit MLC NAND
[FONT=&quot][FONT=&quot]Apacer AS720 - [/FONT][/FONT]128Gbit MLC NAND

SMI SM2256 Controller:
AData SP550 240GB - TLC NAND

Special Thanks to Crucial for providing the memory for this testbed.

SKYMTL · Jul 7, 2016

Read Bandwidth / Write Performance

Read Bandwidth

<i>For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture. We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and thus we no longer included it. The most important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.</i>

<div align="center">
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/AS720/read.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
</div>

Write Performance

<i>For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.</i>

<div align="center">
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/AS720/write.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
</div>

As expected the read and write sequential performance of the Apacer AS720 is fairly decent in both SATA and USB configurations. By that same token the USB 3.1 interface is mostly wasted on this model as its performance abilities of 550Mb/s read and 460MB/s write is going to have a hard time saturating even the older USB 3.0 bus. Apacer may have been better served by using less expensive and more widely accepted USB 3.0 controller and switches instead of wasting their budget on the new ASMedia chipset. Just note however that when used as an external drive this SSD is extremely quick.

SKYMTL · Jul 7, 2016

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark

<i>The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second. </i>

<div align="center">
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/AS720/atto_r.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/AS720/atto_w.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
</div>

The impact from using the integrated USB 3.1 controller is certainly noticeable, but a good argument could be made that this performance loss is more than made up for the improved ease of use.

What is not so easy to tolerate is the level of performance this series offers. To say that it is ‘under powered’ would be overly generous. The JM670 controller may have helped change the overall opinion of JMicron based drives, but there is a big difference between clearing that low-bar and matching what other similarly priced models can accomplish. After all, at the end of the day it is the SATA performance that matters most – as few will ever use this as a USB based device more than once in its lifespan.

SKYMTL · Jul 7, 2016

Crystal DiskMark / PCMark 7

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5 and size at 100MB.

PCMark 7

While there are numerous suites of tests that make up PCMark 7, only one is pertinent: the HDD Suite. The HDD Suite consists of numerous tests that try and replicate real world drive usage. Everything from how long a simulated virus scan takes to complete, to MS Vista start up time to game load time is tested in these core tests; however, we do not consider this anything other than just another suite of synthetic tests. For this reason, while each test is scored individually we have opted to include only the overall score.

Obviously that ASMedia controller and the ASMedia switches cost a good portion of the budget and there was simply no money left over for a high speed controller. Though this is odd as the last two PHISION controllers have gained a reputation for being very, very inexpensive at the wholesale level. In either case, the use of the JMicron controller and a small RAM cache does significantly impact the overall performance of this drive… and using NAND that is rated for only 166MT/s a second also does not help things either.

SKYMTL · Jul 7, 2016

AS-SSD / Anvil Storage Utilities Pro

AS-SSD

AS-SSD is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and small 4K read/write speeds as well as 4K file speed at a queue depth of 6. While its primary goal is to accurately test Solid State Drives, it does equally well on all storage mediums it just takes longer to run each test as each test reads or writes 1GB of data.

Anvil Storage Utilities Pro

Much like AS-SSD, Anvil Pro was created to quickly and easily – yet accurately – test your drives. While it is still in the Beta stages it is a versatile and powerful little program. Currently it can test numerous read / write scenarios but two in particular stand out for us: 4K queue depth of 4 and 4K queue depth of 16. A queue depth of four along with 4K sectors can be equated to what most users will experience in an OS scenario while 16 depth will be encountered only by power users and the like. We have also included the 4k queue depth 1 results to help put these two other numbers in their proper perspective. All settings were left in their default states and the test size was set to 1GB.

Once again the impact from using the USB 3.1 integrated controller is rather noticeable, but tolerable especially if you are using it as an external drive. Also as is becoming the reoccurring theme of this drive, the overall performance of the AS720 is barely adequate for internal use. By modern standards this drive is fairly slow, and fairly expensive for what performance it does offer.

SKYMTL · Jul 7, 2016

IOMeter Results

IOMETER

<i>IOMeter is heavily weighted towards the server end of things, and since we here at HWC are more End User centric we will be setting and judging the results of IOMeter a little bit differently than most. To test each drive we ran 5 test runs per HDD (1,4,16,64,128 queue depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 8 subparts were set to run 100% random, 80% read 20% write; testing 512b, 1k, 2k,4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reports each of the 8 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 8. This gives us an average score for that particular queue depth that is heavily weighted for single user environments.</i>

<div align="center"><img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/AS720/iom.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></div>

This drive is certainly not intended to be used in workstation type scenarios and it shows. At lower queue depths the smaller onboard cache does factor into the equation, but once the depths increase beyond the onboard cache’s abilities to keep up, the already under-powered JMicron controller becomes bottlenecked. Once this happens overall performance suffers greatly.

By that same token even if Apacer had opted for a larger – and more optimal - RAM cache this series would never be a good fit outside of entry level consumers and people who want to use its external capabilities. The combination of controller and NAND is simply not up to the demands these types of scenarios place upon a storage device.

SKYMTL · Jul 7, 2016

Windows / Adobe CS5 Load Time

Windows 8.1 Start Up w/ Boot Time A/V Scan Performance

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. We have chosen Windows 8.1 64bit Pro as our Operating System with all 'fast boot' options disabled in the BIOS. In previous load time tests we would use the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line; this however is no longer the case. We have not only added in a secondary Anti-Virus to load on startup, but also an anti-malware program. We have set Super Anti-Spyware to initiate a quick scan on Windows start-up and the completion of the quick scan will be our new finish line.

ADOBE CS5 LOAD TIME

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit fared in the newly updated Adobe crucible!

As with all the other tests, this model's performance is decent but nothing spectacular. Basically to include USB 3.1 abilities, Apacer did have to make a drive that was a tad bit slower than we would like to have liked to see in this price range. Worse still is there is performance penalty for using it in USB 3.1, but all things considered this penalty is neither here nor there – as the AS720 is still decently fast regardless of which interface is used.

SKYMTL · Jul 7, 2016

Firefox / Real World Data Transfers

Firefox Portable Offline Performance

Firefox is notorious for being slow on loading tabs in offline mode once the number of pages to be opened grows larger than a dozen or so. We can think of fewer worse case scenarios than having 100 tabs set to reload in offline mode upon Firefox startup, but this is exactly what we have done here.

By having 100 pages open in Firefox portable, setting Firefox to reload the last session upon next session start and then setting it to offline mode, we are able to easily recreate a worst case scenario. Since we are using Firefox portable all files are easily positioned in one location, making it simple to repeat the test as necessary. In order to ensure repetition, before touching the Firefox portable files, we have backed them up into a .rar file and only extracted a copy of it to the test device.

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it cannot really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 10.00GB contiguous file and a folder containing 400 subfolders with a total 12,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (10.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found.

There are two ways of looking at these results. On the one hand this level of performance is good enough that we doubt many first time SSD buyers will be anything other than extremely pleased with what the AS720 has to offer. This is especially true when you consider that this drive does not need a USB adapter in order to be used outside the system.

However, when compared to similarly priced models the Apacer AS720 is a touch on the slow side. In other words, this model does provide a decent amount of real world performance but consumers will be paying a premium to get the USB abilities. If the USB interface is important then the performance tradeoff will be worth it. If it’s not that big a deal, this model may be less than optimal for your needs.

SKYMTL · Jul 7, 2016

Partial and Full Drive Performance

Partial and Full Drive Performance

While it is important to know how a drive will perform under optimal conditions, more realistic scenarios are just as important. Knowing if a solid state drive will behave differently when partially or even nearly full than when it is empty is very important information to know. To quickly and accurately show this crucial information we have first filled the drive to 50% capacity and re-tested using both synthetic and real world tests. After the completion of this we then re-test at 75% and 90% of full capacity.

Synthetic Test Results

For our synthetic testing we have opted for our standard PCMark 7 test.

Real World Results

For a real world application we have opted for a modified version of our standard Windows 7 Start Up test. Unlike our standard Windows 7 image this image is based on a working system that has been upgraded numerous times of the past few years and represents an even more realistic real world test.

As this is a JMicron JMF670 based model these results are pretty much in line with what we expected them to be. Put another way they highligh are a known a weakness of this controller when the drive gets filled close to its capacity.

Apacer AS720 480GB SATA / USB 3.1 SSD Review

HardwareCanuck Review Editor

HardwareCanuck Review Editor

Testing Methodology

HardwareCanuck Review Editor

Read Bandwidth

Write Performance

HardwareCanuck Review Editor

ATTO Disk Benchmark

HardwareCanuck Review Editor

Crystal DiskMark

PCMark 7

HardwareCanuck Review Editor

AS-SSD

Anvil Storage Utilities Pro

HardwareCanuck Review Editor

IOMETER

HardwareCanuck Review Editor

Windows 8.1 Start Up w/ Boot Time A/V Scan Performance

ADOBE CS5 LOAD TIME

HardwareCanuck Review Editor

Firefox Portable Offline Performance

Real World Data Transfers

HardwareCanuck Review Editor

Partial and Full Drive Performance

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