Don't be fooled by the catchy name and the panther-spot textured design. Before us is a series of old-school SATA SSDs, the main charm of which lies not in exorbitant speeds, but in record low prices. For example, the Panther AS340X is one of the cheapest solid state drives that you can buy in east european retail in 2021.


Like all low-cost SATA SSDs of recent years, Panther drives are based on 3D TLC NAND memory, but unlike many competitors, they have a more capacious SLC cache and an impressive resource of claimed work. Despite their catchy name, these drives run at the same speed as other SATA SSDs - the 560 Mbps bar cannot be jumped due to the limitations of the SATA 3 bus.

But the IOPS indicators in more current Panther models have been tightened up. If for old panthers this figure was usually limited to 27-35K, then for more current drives a la Panther AS340X these figures reach 80-87K. As opposed to linear speed, these numbers help you better understand how the drive will perform with small 4K files and data arrays.

The panther family includes 5 – 6 individuals with a volume from 120 to 960 – 1000 GB. All of them belong to the 2.5 format. They differ due to different types of memory (TLC and 3D TLC NAND) and the memory controllers used. It is these factors that mainly affect the speed performance of Panther drives.