A Closer Look
The drive comes with an optional heatsink but doesn’t come pre-installed. This is good, as if you have a high-end cooler of your own, or a good one included on your motherboard, you can simply use that instead. It’s also a standard 2280 M.2 form factor, so there’s no reason why it wouldn’t fit in most laptops/notebooks or consoles such as the PlayStation 5.
The drive uses the popular Phison E26 controller, which offers a range of stability and reliability features to this drive. The AS2280F4 has built-in data security and error-correction capabilities, SLC caching, built-in wear levelling, and automatic error correction.
Using the latest SK Hynix ICs, and the Phison controller, it’s no wonder this drive can deliver up to 12000MB/s read speeds, however, while its operating temperatures are 0 to 70c, I’d bet this drive would hit over 100c without any form of cooling, so I do not suggest running it without a heatsink, especially since it comes with one already bundled in the box.
The included cooler is pretty chunky but comes with a clip-over design using a metal backplate to hold the aluminium block and fan over the top. There are two thermal pads included too, ensuring the back and front of the PCB make good contact with the cooling surface.
The fan may look small, but it’s appropriate to the size of the heatsink without causing conflict with your CPU socket, PCIe lanes and other hardware. Apacer says this heatsink design can deliver up to 25% temperature reduction, albeit they don’t say in comparison to what, but I don’t doubt it’ll make things perform better in general.
Overall, this is a neat-looking package, and to think how small it is and the level of performance these little drives can deliver is pretty mind-boggling!
The cooler is simple enough to configure though, with a PWM header it can be hooked up to your motherboard easily enough. So, with that out of the way, let’s get to testing!
