COLORFUL SL500 Summer Edition 640GB SSD Review

COLORFUL has been making big splashes as of late with its announcement of its RTX GPUs, but it doesn’t mean all the attention has to be there. The company has also been busy expanding its portfolio of offerings, and one that’s worthy to mention is its 640GB SSD for the prize and size alone. For this one, COLORFUL sent us the Summer Edition of their SL500 SSD, and we’ll be putting it to the test this time around.

COLORFUL has been making big splashes as of late with its announcement of its RTX GPUs, but it doesn’t mean all the attention has to be there. The company has also been busy expanding its portfolio of offerings, and one that’s worthy to mention is its 640GB SSD for the prize and size alone. For this one, COLORFUL sent us the Summer Edition of their SL500 SSD, and we’ll be putting it to the test this time around.

PACKAGING

It’s not really a stretch to call the COLORFUL SL500 Summer Edition SSD’s presentation simple and clean. For starters, it’s a breath of fresh air from the usual offerings in the market with closed boxes and signature designs on packaging. Let’s put that aside for now and have all the eyes for COLORFUL’s SSD’s box design – it arrives in a compact white box with a cutout on the middle to showcase the SSD itself in full glory. The size is indicated at the bottom right, while at the opposite end there’s the showcase of the drive’s characteristics that we’ll be putting to the test. The back on the other hand is more of a detailed view for perusing customers looking to see more info on the SL500.

As far as the packaging goes, the SL500 Summer Edition SSD comes inside a light plastic shell together with warranty information and installation guide. A set of screws would have been nice to see in the package.

DESIGN

COLORFUL’s SSDs are probably what you’d call refreshing, for what it’s worth. While most of the offerings from other companies settle for a darker, edgier look and slapping stickers on top of it, COLORFUL builds on the beautiful design of the original SL500 SSD and gives it a color boost aptly named for the season of summer. This is the golden ratio that’s clad in a bright blue hue that would definitely look so good with thematic builds and casemods. It’s still a 2.5-inch drive, just so you know.

PERFORMANCE

It's the usual setup. We'll be putting the SL500 Summer Edition SSD on our several test methods to see how it fares. So, yeah. Onto the benchies.

TEST SYSTEM SETUP
Motherboard	GIGABYTE AB350M-DH3
CPU	AMD RYZEN 5 1600 3.2GHz
GPU	ZOTAC GTX 1060 6GB AMP
RAM	16GB DDR4 2400MHz
Cooler	Corsair H60 (2018)
Storage	Plextor M9e 512GB M.2 SSD+ Seagate BarraCuda 4TB + 2TB Western Digital Green HDD + COLORFUL SL500 Summer Edition 640GB SSD
PSU	EVGA 500 BV 500w 80+ Bronze
Case	Silverstone RL06
OS	Windows 10 Pro N
Display	BenQ GW2270H

ATTO Disk Benchmark 

ATTO Disk Benchmark is an industry leading benchmark that help measure performance of system storage such as hard drives, solid state drives, RAID arrays, and so forth.

Crystal Disk Mark 

We begin with one of the storage benchmark standards with Crystal Disk Mark to measure both of its read and write rates through a series of tests.

AS SSD Benchmark 

AS SSD Benchmark can determine an SSD's performance by conducting several specific tests on sequential or random read/write performance without using the cache.

Real World Performance 

For the real world performance, we'll be using a set of 20GB file consisting of 119 video files, as well as an archived 16GB to test it out. The files are copied from the Plextor M9e NVME SSD to the target drive (SL500). The time is measured in seconds.

*We didn't include the real world performance from the reference comparison points as it's data transfer from an HDD to the target drive. And since we're looking to reach peak performance now, we'll be using file transfers from our primary Plextor M9e NVME SSD to eliminate any bottlenecks from now onwards. Synthetic benchmarks are kept to where they are at as results are natively dependent of the target drive.

CONCLUSION

With SSDs now becoming the standard for high-performance gaming machines, you most likely have slowly abandoned the traditional hard drive setup to store your files and games. Granted, disk platters may easily spell the best price/gb ratio, but if you're looking for a faster solution, you'd look elsewhere. 2.5-inch SSDs are becoming more affordable, and COLORFUL's SL500 Limited Edition Summer SSD drives the point home.

COLORFUL slaps a $129 price tag on the SL500 Summer Edition SSD, and based on our research they'll be shipping it with a 32GB flash drive for kicks. 

Easy enough. That's great value right there.