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APOTOP may not be the first company many would consider when in the market for a new Solid State Drive – however in the Far East they are a fairly well known maker of peripherals and electronic devices. Their new S3C SATA III SSD is available in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB sizes.
The new Apotop S3C SSD features the Silicon Motion 2246EN controller which we first reviewed in the Angelbird 512GB wrk SSD back in August this year. The controller impressed us, so we have already high hopes for the Apotop S3C.
GENERAL SPECIFICATIONS
Capacity
64, 128, 256, 512 GB
Interface
SATA 6Gb/s, 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s supported. SATA 3.1 compliant
Controller
Silicon Motion® 2246EN
Over provisioning
~7%
Flash
Synchronous MLC
Form Factor
2.5 inch slim, 7mm
Features
Overload protection, TRIM, ECC EMS protection, SMART
The Apotop S3C box art is very simple – black and purple with some details of the drive and the capacity clearly listed on the front. The slogan ‘Always On the Top' doesn't translate particularly well into English – ‘Always On Top' would have worked better for them.
The back of the box covers some details in multiple languages – alongside a CDM result (CrystalDiskMark) showing performance rated at ‘up to' 490 MB/s read and 275MB/S write).
The company include a 3.5 inch mounting bracket. The drive measures 7mm thick – making it ideal for an ultraportable replacement drive.
The chassis is painted black with a sticker on the front highlighting the product name and capacity.
The Silicon Motion 2246EN controller supports TLC, MLC and SLC NAND flash and the firmware is said to be robust and tweakable to suit many environments. This is a 4 channel solid state controller and is said to deliver greater performance than many 8 channel controllers. Power consumption is also highly optimised.
Synchronous MLC Flash NAND is used in this drive. It has overload protection, TRIM support, ECC EMS protection and SMART protection.
On this page we present some high resolution images of the product in our studio. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
Kitguru Test Rig 3
Other Drives
Angelbird 512GB wrk
Hynix SH920/910A
OCZ ARC 100 240GB
OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Intel 520 Series 240GB
Intel 730 240GB
Samsung 840 EVO 1TB
OCZ Vector 150 256GB
OCZ Vector 240GB
OCZ Vertex 450 256GB
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB
OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (1.4 fw)
ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB
Intel 730 240GB
OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SDD
SanDisk Extreme II 240GB
Corsair Performance Pro 256GB
OCZ Agility 4 256GB
SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB
Samsung 830 Series 512GB
Patriot Wildfire 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS
ADATA S510 120GB
Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB
OCZ Octane 512GB (fw 1.13)
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
AS SSD.
IOMeter.
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.
Apotop seem to have conservatively rated the drive – claiming it would score ‘up to' 490 MB/s read and 275 MB/s write. Our own tests show close to 550MB/s read and 300 MB/s write. 4K performance looks to be strong – hitting between 290 MB/s and 300 MB/s in write and read tests respectively.
This drive handles compressible and incompressible data equally well, which is always beneficial.
Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in the last year.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Read performance is class leading, peaking at 561MB/s – the real world limitations of the SATA 3 interface. Write performance isn't quite as impressive peaking around 300 MB/s.
Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
AS SSD deals exclusively with incompressible data and the results are very good – highlighting the strength of the Silicon Motion 2246EN controller. The overall score of 941 isn't quite at the same level as the market leaders, but its in the top 10% percent.
Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings.
IOPS performance is very good, actually outperforming the other Silicon Motion 2246EN controlled drive we reviewed recently. The final IOPS scores between 70,000 and 75,000 indicate strong performance.
The Apotop S3C 256GB SSD is another high performance drive powered by the Silicon Motion 2246EN controller. The S3C is certainly capable for a variety of tasks, including gaming and other, more serious duties.
This is the second time we have tested a Silicon Motion SM2246EN controlled drive and there is no doubt it delivers well balanced results in all areas. Apotop have been conservative in their estimates of performance ‘up to' 490 MB/s read and 275 MB/s write. Our own results show closer to 550 MB/s read and 300 MB/s write. Random 4K performance is excellent, scoring 71,784 random write 4k IOPS and 73,319 random read 4k IOPS.
The controller is also able to handle incompressible and compressible data without any penalty to performance. If you often deal with incompressible data such as ZIP/RAR files, video and PSD documents then this drive will deliver the goods. The popular Sandforce 2281 controller suffers from a significant performance drop due to the time it takes with additional processing in the same situation.
The Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller is fully loaded with reliability features, using an advanced dynamic global wear-leveling and bad block management algorithm. It data shapes to increase reliability through reduced coupling effects. The MTBF is said to be 2,000,000 hours with a data retention level rated for 10 years. Apotop offer a modest 3 year warranty with the drive.
Availability of the drive may be an issue for European punters – as we have been told that initial stocks will be limited to the USA and Far East. UK availability is said to come ‘in the near future'.
Just before publication we received pricing information. The 128GB version will cost $59.00. The 256GB version will cost $99.00. The 512GB version will cost $199.00.
Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE.
Pros:
- performance is very high.
- incompressible and compressible is equally good.
- sequential read can saturate SATA 3 interface.
- seems competitively priced.
Cons:
- poor availability.
- stiff competition.
- write performance could be better.
Kitguru says: An excellent drive that is sadly only available in certain parts of the world right now. We will be interested to see UK pricing when it becomes available.
