Remember back 2014 when 60GB SSD price are around $50 - $70? That's are the same price you get for 1TB 5400rpm Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Year after year, SSD price are getting cheaper. Good things is, people now has many choice from entry level to super speed SSD that are affordable to buy.
As we also decide to upgrade our machine for faster storage, we choose A400 2.5 SSD from Kingston. A 120GB ones, as we only want to use it as a boot drive only.
1. UNBOXING
Packaging Are simple and nice. An SSD it self sit in a nice designed packaging box. No manual sheet, just some information at the back of the box. We got an 2017 model as we see on 2018 models they use clear plastic packaging with updated firmware. That's not a big deal after all, after install to our PC, we manually update it from Windows Device Manager.
2. BUILD QUALITY AND SPECIFICATIONS
The SSD build quality are great. A nice touch of matte metal with dark surface body makes the SSD looks premium.
A little bit of A400 120 GB specification. They using Phison S11 controler with Toshiba's 15mm 3bit TLC NAND. When it comes to performance the A400 drives are rated at up to 500MB/s for sequential read and up to 350MB/s for sequential write, making it roughly 10x faster than a 5400rpm hard disk drive.
2. SIMPLE TEST
We use CrystalDiskMark version 5.2 for testing A400 SSD using our Lenovo Ideapad 320. Our machine specification are AMD A9 9420 Dual core APU with R5 graphics. You may get a glimpse of our Ideapad 320 in our article.
As expected from entry level SSD, 120GB A400 that we test are fast enough for us. Test result show 482 Mb/s read and 230 Mb/s write which are a little bit slow from what Kingston claim but we are okay with that.
3. CONCLUSION
As we only test for 120GB A400 on budget AMD APU laptops, you might get better result with better test machine. Over all SSD that are sequence read more than 350 Mb/s are fast enough at least for entry level SSD. And we can't wait to order some more for replacing our PC's and laptop's old HDD boot drive :)
How did you know that's the 2017 packaging? Some people claim that it's fake if it's boxed liked that.
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