Apacer AS2280 Q4L PCIe Gen4 1TB M.2 SSD Review

Apacer rates this drive for up to 3600 MB/s read and 3000 MB/s write, but in our first test it had no trouble exceeding both these figures, but keep in mind we’re using our high-end test system and more modest systems may come in a bit lower, but that’s to be expected.

IOPS look consistent with a Gen4 drive, scoring around 250K in the Q32T1 test.

It scored strongly in Anvil, with 21747 points overall, and showed respectable response times for a drive of this class.

The drive gets up to full speed very quickly, handling smaller file transfers better than a lot of high-end drives, reaching optimal read and write speeds from 32K upwards.

In AS SSD we saw IOPS of over 600K, which again exceeds the up to 600K specification given by Apacer.

Read speeds are very good here too, again exceeding expectations and resulting in great performance for ISO, Program and Game loading scenarios.

A clean bill of health for AJA, so this drive has no issues for direct recording of high-resolution media.

A little inconstant here, with the drive fluctuating in write performance throughout the test, but otherwise, still sitting around 3000 MB/s during compression testing.

Gaming loading times should not be an issue, with the drive scoring Extremely High in FF XIV.

And finally, we see good loading times for all game tests, file moving and for quick saving and loading, making this a well rounded drive for gamers.

The drive did run a little hotter than I expected with the peak temperature hitting 75c, 5c outside the 70c max operating temperature, which will have resulted in some throttling, and that was likely the inconsistency we saw in the compression test. However, this only trimmed a few hundred MB/s off the speed and only occurred during prolonged stress tests, if you’re just gaming, I doubt that’ll be an issue.