Acer FA200 4TB SSD Review: A Capacious Retread

If the Acer FA200 feels familiar, it’s probably because it’s a clone of the HP FX700, both made by Biwin. That isn’t a bad thing. The FX700 demonstrated that YMTC could produce high-quality QLC flash, which, when paired with the right controller, proved surprisingly performant. Add in excellent power efficiency at up to 4TB, and you have a budget winner on your hands. An affordable, fully-fledged PCIe 4.0 SSD for all your games, media, and backups in an inoffensive single-sided package. Sounds pretty good to me.

It’s been over 21 months since that review, though, and the storage landscape has changed significantly in that time. The Crucial P310 and Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 have redefined what a QLC flash drive can do. You also have TLC drives like the Sandisk WD Black SN7100 that offer all the advantages of QLC – capacity and low cost – without the disadvantages. We also have PCIe 5.0 drives like the WD Black SN8100 that defy convention with ridiculous performance and power efficiency. This makes the Acer FA200 feel almost old-school and outdated, yet it’s still a capable drive.

If there’s a real problem here, it’s that the NAND flash market is in disarray as of late, in part due to the impact of large data demands for AI. QLC flash is designed to be denser and cheaper than TLC, so it’s in higher demand, making consumer SSDs an afterthought for supply. This hurts drives like the FA200 because they don’t have the usual price advantage, and vertically-integrated companies like Crucial and Sandisk can afford to hoard and use their own manufactured QLC flash.

The YMTC flash from China should help the FA200 get around this problem, but political friction and stigma continue to make things challenging. This has put pressure on PCIe 4.0 drives in general, making PCIe 5.0 options increasingly attractive in comparison as time passes. That sounds outlandish, but the same thing happened with PCIe 3.0 in its time.

This isn’t all bad news, as the newer PCIe 5.0 drives are actually quite excellent. They just have to come down in price. However, it does mean that if you’re looking to scoop up a high-capacity drive solely for storage – such as a PCIe 4.0 drive with a capacity of up to 4TB and possibly QLC flash – then you should consider doing so sooner rather than later. Black Friday and the next Prime Day are just around the corner, so there's still time left, but we suggest nailing down what you want ahead of time.

The FA200 falls into the budget or secondary drive category. It’s perfect for general storage, works great with the PS5, and the graphene label ensures it stays cool enough for laptops. If you can find it or a similar drive on sale, particularly one with 2TB or more storage capacity, then it’s not such a bad choice. Just don’t expect it to handle sustained writes well. This is not the drive to look at if you want TLC flash and/or DRAM, but among the DRAM-less QLC drives, you could do a lot worse. We think the P310 and Blue SN5100 are better, but you might be able to snag an FA200 or equivalent for less while enjoying the same general level of performance for the intended role.

Acer FA200 Specifications

Acer covers the full range of capacities by offering the FA200 in the 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB sizes. At the time of review, the 500GB model was not available; however, based on pricing in other regions, it should be priced below $55. The rest are at $64.99, $117.99, and $219.99. These prices are too high for this hardware, as similar drives, such as the Orico e7400 and the TeamGroup MP44Q, are listed for less. The 1TB and 2TB models should be priced at around $60 and $100, respectively. The 4TB is a hard sell compared to the WD Black SN7100, which features TLC rather than QLC flash and is currently available for $209.99.

The FA200 can hit peak performance at just 1TB, with sequential reads and writes of up to 7,200/6,200 MB/s and up to 1,000K/850K random read and write IOPS. The drive comes with the standard five-year warranty and supports up to 500TB of writes per TB of capacity. This is less than the standard 600TB, but the drive uses QLC flash. This makes the listed endurance/TBW higher than normal, as QLC drives usually have a warranty for about half the write endurance of TLC. We don’t think this write limit is a weak point for the FA200.

Acer FA200 Software and Accessories

Acer’s drives, like HP’s, are made by Biwin. The software for the FA200 is Biwin Intelligence, which is your standard SSD toolbox application. This is multifunctional with S.M.A.R.T. health and system information, and numerous other features. Such features include a performance test, data migration and cloning, drive erasure, firmware updates, error scanning, TRIM optimization, and drive monitoring.

Acer FA200: A Closer Look

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The FA200 is single-sided at all capacities – including the 4TB model being reviewed today – which simplifies installation and cooling. The drive does have a graphene heatspreading label, which we’ve found to be actually useful. This is similar to the HP FX700's solution, which makes sense as Biwin makes drives for both companies, and the FX700’s hardware is identical to the FA200’s. The drive has a controller without DRAM and four NAND flash packages.

The 4TB FA200 achieves equal or better results than the 2TB FX700 in our analysis, suggesting that the firmware has been updated – specifically, SN15536 on the FA200 and SN14428 on the FX700 – and that the Maxio controller is optimized for 4TB of QLC flash. You are not sacrificing significant performance or power efficiency to reach 4TB, which is often the case with other four-channel, DRAM-less solutions.

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Our thoughts above match the controller in question: the Maxio MAP1602-F3C is the updated version of the MAP1602, specifically designed to handle 4TB of flash. This controller can get very hot in our experience, but a simple heatspreader can mitigate that issue nicely. The flash in question here is YMTC’s 232-Layer QLC, which has done just fine for us in the past. This flash is perfectly suitable for games and general storage and does not suffer unduly on a 4TB drive. To be succinct, we are not aware of any peculiarities with this hardware in general.

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