Overall and Final Verdict
It's funny when you come across a product that you didn’t know people needed until you see it. The AS720 falls into that category. I’ve used USB docks, USB to SATA adapters, and many times I have had to use my test benches to clone hard drives. You see for someone who has those tools available, upgrading or replacing a drive isn’t all that hard. But when your only PC is a laptop with one drive spot it gets complicated to replace the hard drive or SSD. With the AS720, Apacer has made connecting their SSD in that situation simple and given the USB 3.1 interface fast as well. The USB transfer speeds didn’t match the SATA performance, but they weren’t far behind. The SATA numbers weren’t really blowing up the charts as well, but the drive held its own in most of our tests.
What really caught my attention though was the possibility of using the AS720 as an external SSD all of the time. It has the capacity and speed to work and you can quickly plug it in on any PC. The thin size makes it smaller than any of the other drives on the market as well. Really the only downside to that is the thin plastic casing they used for the top half of the drive. If it was an all metal casing I wouldn’t even be worried about banging it around in my bag. The styling, however, doesn’t really fit for in a PC or out of a PC.
The problem is the drive falls into this weird middle ground. When I looked into pricing for the 240GB AS720 that we tested, it is currently selling for $116.99. As an internal SSD, this is completely out of line with the competition. Those drives are selling for half that price. But for an external USB SSD, the AS720 is actually priced cheaper than most of the drives with a similar capacity. I feel like Apacer are really on to something by integrating a Type C connection into their SSD, but I think the drive needs to stay a little closer to the pricing for similar drives to really be justifiable. That said, it’s a cool feature that I think could really help them sell drives in the future.
