The Plextor S2C wasn't made to impress. It's a 6Gbps SATA standard solid-state drive (SSD) that aims to do its job on the cheap. And its job is straightforward: replace the traditional hard drive on a computer.

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While the S2C's speed can't compare to most SSD drives I've reviewed, it's still so much faster than any regular hard drive that it's worth getting -- especially given its relatively bargain-level price. The 512GB version has a MSRP of just under $134 in the US, or about 25 cents per gigabyte. The price roughly converts to £110 and AU$175. And like all SSDs, you can expect the street price to be even lower.

So how well does it perform and how exactly does it stack up against other SSDs? In copy tests the S2C had one of the fastest real-world read speeds I've ever seen, delivering 433 megabytes per second. However, its write speed was terrible, topping out at just 148 megabits per second. That's the lowest write speed of any SSD I've tested.

What it costs US price UK conversion Australia conversion 512GB $133.99 £110 AU$175 256GB $75.99 £60 AU$100 128GB $45.99 £40 AU$60

Keep in mind however, since read speed dictates how fast a computer boots up and how quickly applications launch, it generally contributes more to a computer's performance than the write speed. For this reason, in PC Mark 8 tests, which gauge the overall performance of a computer, the S2C ended up right in the middle of the entry-level SSD pack in terms of performance. However, when performing daily tasks like word processing, surfing the web and so on, I didn't see any difference between the S2C and other SSDs. You need heavy tasks such as gaming, video editing and so on to notice the difference between SSDs.