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.