Acer FA200 M.2 2TB SSD Review

Enos Tech Verdict

If you are looking for a standard M.2 that does what it says on the tin, the Acer FA200 is for you. It offers some impressive speeds while remaining cool and best of all, it won’t break the bank. It’s impressive Gen 4 read and write speeds will help see you through any task at hand. For those looking to clone their old drives, the FA200 also comes with a free version of Acronis True Image, further ensuring you have the easiest time possible getting the FA200 drive up and running your system.

With a myriad of options available these days, it can be hard to know what SSD to choose. You may even notice that a lot of companies or manufacturers make multiple drives that all look quite similar, and may have very minor differences. Some SSDs may offer DRAM for faster speeds while others, like the FA200 are DRAM-less so while the speeds might not be quite as good as those with DRAM, they aren’t far off. One of the major benefits of DRAM-less drives is they are generally a bit cheaper and more budget friendly.

Specifications

Pricing and availability

• £97.74 on Amazon UK at the time of review.

Closer Look

The Acer FA200 comes with a small sticker like label that doubles as a thing heatsink to keep the drive cool. As you can see in the image below, it is completely green, except for the Acer logo. It can be remove quite easily and doing so does not really affect the temps as we will see later in this review.

The other side of the drive has the normal label sticker. This label will give us our part and serial numbers that will likely be needed for any RMA claims. We can also see that we do in fact have the 2TB version of the FA200.

As this is a DRAM0less drive, all the chips are on a single side of the NVMe. There are 4 NAND flash chips labelled “BWN0AQF1B1HCAD”. Each of the 4 NANDs are 512GB which makes up the 2TB drive size. These NANDs communicate directly with the controller with a maximum bus speed of 2400MT/s.

The FA200 uses the MAP1602A controller from MaxioTech. The MAP1602 boasts being the first controller to handle the 2400 MT/s NAND flash memory without overclocking. It also supports PCIe 4.0 without external cache making it the perfect pairing for Acers own FA200 2TB NVMe SSD.

It’s always funs to take a bit closer look at all the SMD fuses and the intricate details that go into such a product. Looking at them quickly and this will all go unnoticed but taking a deeper look and you can see the amount of time and effort that goes into what appears to be such a small piece of hardware.

Test System and Results

Motherboard: Asrock Z790 Taichi Lite
CPU: Intel Core i7-13700KF
Memory: ACER PREDATOR Pallas II 6000MHz DDR5
OS Storage: OCPC MBL-400 1TB NVMe SSD
Operating System: Windows 11 with all updates

*All tests were run on a brand-new drive. The drive was assigned a new simple volume and drive letter and that’s it. No files or programs were installed on the drive during any of the below tests.

3DMARK Storage Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Anvil Storage Utilities

CrystalDiskMark

HWMonitor (Idle) Temperature

HWMonitor (ATTO/Load) Temperature

Final Words

The Acer FA200 is the perfect drive for your average everyday user. It offers great speeds, low temps and is affordably priced when compared to similar drives on the market. If you don’t need the top of the line speeds or features, than there is no need on wasting the money and this is where the FA200 comes in. The Gen 4 speeds on offer will have all your programs and games loading up in no time and can also breathe a bit of life into older systems that offer compatibility. Of course, the FA200 is backwards compatible so will work on systems that only support PCIe 3.0 drives if needed.

Whether you need a new drive for your PC, laptop or gaming device such as a PS5, the Acer FA200 will do the job and it will do it well!