Apacer Panther AS340X AP480GAS340XC 480 GB

Black Panther

Despite the catchy name and the panther-spotted texture design, these Apacer SSDs are purely low-cost models. Sometimes so much so that the Panther AS340X turned out to be one of the cheapest solid state drives in east european retail. Like all low-cost SATA SSDs of recent years, it is based on 3D TLC NAND memory, but unlike many competitors, it has a more capacious SLC cache and an impressive 280 TB of claimed work life.

The volume of the SLC cache is about 35% of the total volume of the disk

Theoretically, the speed characteristics of the drive can reach 550 and 520 MB / s for linear reading and writing, respectively (this is the maximum of the SATA 3 interface). But in fact, in the CDM, SSD Benchmark, ATTO Disk tests, we got plus or minus identical 520 and 430 MB / s. The approximate volume of the SLC cache is about 35% of the total volume of the disk. And that's good news, because the AS340X runs at the same high speed until the buffer fills up. Bad news - after filling the buffer from the AS340X, the soul seemed to be shaken out and the read speed dropped to a very limited 80 MB / s, although the graphs showed the controller's attempts to restore performance.

Decent IOPS for 4K blocks

But for what it is worth praising the company's engineers, it is for raising the IOPS indicators. In the new Panther AS340X, these figures reach 80-87K, although in older "panthers" this figure was usually limited to 27-35K. This indicator indicates the number of I / O operations that the SSD can perform per second of time. Simply put, this is a useful secondary metric that will help you understand how the SSD will behave in everyday use, when something is constantly happening on the system SSD.