The Apacer AS2280P2 is a cost-effective SSD design built around the Phison E8 controller and Toshiba TLC flash. In order to reduce cost, the Phison E8 only comes with support for PCI-Express x2 connectivity, while most of the competition uses the x4 interface which provides twice the theoretical throughput. The keyword here is "theoretical": while some drives can achieve read speeds exceeding PCIe x2 bandwidth, this mostly matters in synthetic benchmarks or when copying large amounts of data. For every day usage, the differences are small, as our real-life testing shows. Compared to other drives in our test group, the AS2280P2 does well and reaches speeds nearly exactly matching the Crucial P1, Intel 760p, and Samsung 970 EVO (most of which are more expensive). High-end drives like the ADATA SX8200/Pro or Samsung 970 Pro are around 5% faster, which isn't a whole lot even though their synthetic testing results are much higher.

When announced initially, Apacer clearly showed the AS2280P2 as a DRAM-less design (look at the first picture in the news post: no DRAM chip). I guess you can imagine how surprised I was when my review sample arrived with DRAM. I checked with Apacer and they say that my version of the drive is the one for the European market, which I guess suggests that other markets get a DRAM-less drive, which definitely reduces performance, so definitely take a close look at what you're buying.

The Apacer AS2280P2 did extremely well in our thermal testing. Even without a heatsink and no airflow over the drive, we never saw it throttling, which is great, especially if you are looking for an M.2 NVMe drive that will see serious load in a badly ventilated case. Sequential writes are alright for a TLC-based drive—I wish the pSLC buffer were bigger as its current 4 GB size can have a real-life impact when performing larger file copy operations. Even when writing directly to flash, the AS2280 delivers a solid, constant 500 MB/s, which is faster than most SATA TLC SSDs.

What really matters most in this market segment is pricing. With $100, or 21 cents per GB, the Apacer AS2280 is very reasonable priced and more affordable than most of the competition. For example, the Samsung 970 EVO 500 GB and Intel 760p are both around $150—I'd definitely pick the AS2280P2 instead due to the significant cost savings. Crucial's P1 is a bit cheaper at $75, but is slower, too, due to the use of QLC flash. Strong competition comes from ADATA in the form of the SX8200 and SX8200 Pro, which are only like $10 more expensive than the AS2280P2, but offer much better performance. If you are looking for the cheapest cost per GB and performance is only secondary, then 2.5" SSDs using the SATA interface could be an alternative, but they lack the performance improvements of NVMe drives, especially when it comes to large file transfers.