Apotop S3C 256GB Low-Cost SSD Review
Futuremark PCMark 8 Extended - Consistency Test
Version and / or Patch Used: 2.0.228
Heavy Usage Model:
Futuremark's PCMark 8 allows us to wear the test drive down to a reasonable consumer steady state, and then watch the drive recover on its own through garbage collection. To do that, the drive gets pushed down to steady state with random writes, and then idle time between a number of tests allows the drive to recover.
Precondition Phase:
1. Write the drive sequentially through, up to the reported capacity with random data.
2. Write the drive through a second time (to take care of overprovisioning).
Degradation Phase:
1. Run writes of random size between 8*512 and 2048*512 bytes on random offsets for ten minutes.
2. Run performance test (one pass only).
3. Repeat steps one and two, eight times, and on each pass increase the duration of random writes by five minutes.
Steady state Phase:
1. Run writes of random size between 8*512 and 2048*512 bytes on random offsets for 50 minutes.
2. Run performance test (one pass only).
3. Repeat steps one and two, five times.
Recovery Phase:
1. Idle for five minutes.
2. Run performance test (one pass only).
3. Repeat one and two, five times.
Storage Bandwidth
PCMark 8's Consistency test provides a ton of data output that we use to judge a drive's performance. Here we see the three states of performance for the select SSDs, which are light use, consumer steady state, and worst case.

The Apotop S3C performs surprisingly well in comparison to other drives under light use (orange and red bars). Under heavy load, the S3C is slow, but still faster than many of the other low-cost SSDs on the market. The OCZ ARC 100 is one of the fastest low-cost drives in these tests, but it does cost a bit more than the S3C.
Storage Bandwidth All Tests
Here we see the results from all of the test. The Apotop S3C is black line, and is easily comparable to the other drives on the market. We like to look at the Recovery 1 performance for consumer SSDs. At that mark, the S3C falls on the lower side of the pack, but right in the middle of the low-cost SSD group.
PRICING: You can find products similar to this one for sale below.
United States: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon's website.
United Kingdom: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon UK's website.
Canada: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon Canada's website.
- Page 1 [Introduction & Specifications, Pricing, and Availability]
- Page 2 [Apotop S3C 256GB SSD]
- Page 3 [Test System Setup and ATTO Baseline Performance]
- Page 4 [Benchmarks - Anvil Storage Utilities]
- Page 5 [Benchmarks - Mixed Read / Write Workloads]
- Page 6 [PCMark 8 Consistency Test]
- Page 7 [PCMark 8 Consistency Test - Continued]
- Page 8 [Benchmarks - Power Testing]
- Page 9 [Final Thoughts]
- We at TweakTown openly invite the companies who provide us with review samples / who are mentioned or discussed to express their opinion of our content. If any company representative wishes to respond, we will publish the response here.
Related Tags
Latest News Posts
- Get caught up in 'Girl in the Spider's Web' Blu-ray giveaway
- Activision: Destiny was tying up our resources
- Activision cut jobs to focus on monetization as well as dev
- Anthem's epic skins cost $8.50 a piece
- Crackdown 3 only exists to sell Game Pass subscriptions
Forum Activity
- Resident Evil 2 Remake Review: Fright Night
- HELP !!!! ASROCK Z77 PRO3 "NON-K OC MENU" disappeared :-(
- GeIL Super Luce RGB Sync DDR4-3200 16GB Memory Kit Review
- ASRock Multi-Gigabit Performance: 10GbE/5GbE/2.5G Networking
- Very odd boot behavior on three identical x399 Taichi builds.
Press Releases
- New Screenshots for ShaRkPG, Maneater | PC Version to Support NVIDIA Ansel Technology
- The world's first judicial friendship simulator takes to Kickstarter in Supreme Courtship!
- Cupid hits Ring of Elysium with Valentine's Day event
- New Gameplay Video for World-Shaping RTS Bannermen Released
- Nokia launches Cognitive Collaboration Hubs to help operators design 5G networks and create AI-enabled use cases