What’s in the box?
The package is typical for Acer branded storage products. The exterior is well-described, with general specifications and product info. Inside is a quick start guide and a single screw that can be handy if we miss it in our motherboard or laptop.
The SSD is as tiny as all M.2 2230 SSDs. The PCB has a few components. In this form factor, the only ones worth mentioning are a single NAND chip and a Silicon Motion controller. There is no space for DRAM, so the SSD uses RAM as a cache. New generations of SSDs use it pretty well, and the results are surprisingly good. I can already share that the MA200 is one of the fastest M.2 2230 SSDs we tested. More performance details are on the next page of this review.
The MA200 1TB SSD has a graphene heatsink, but we already know it’s not helping much. It’s still better than nothing, as I mentioned; the SSD runs quite hot. Airflow can be a problem, especially in tight spaces of ultrabooks or handheld gaming consoles. We shouldn’t see any throttling during typical work or gaming, but we must be prepared for that during extended data copying, as mainly writes cause peak temperatures.
The MA200 has a free digital version of Acronis software, which helps us move the old data and operating system to a new SSD.
Below is the MA200 installed on a Steam Deck. Since this handheld console has limited bandwidth to a PCIe 3.0 x4, we decided to run tests on a regular, modern desktop motherboard.
Let’s move to the next page to see our test results.
