Review on Kingston 240GB Solid SA400S37 240G by Kristen Reid

I have been familiar with Kingston A400 SSDs for 2 months now. Two such drives were purchased from me at work - the first, with a capacity of 120 GB, replaced the dead HDD on a Lenovo G560 laptop, the second, with 240 GB, replaced the old and barely crawling HDD in an almost new PC (yes, they just don’t do anything for the sake of saving - even an old hard drive is stuffed into a new PC). I decided not to do two almost identical reviews on these drives, so I'll just add a little about the 120 GB drive here. Kingston A400 drives are sold in a simple blister. Complete set: packing, drive. The packaging itself does not provide any specific information about the drive, except for the size of the drive and the mention of compatibility with SATA II and USB 2.0 via an adapter. A little more information about the Kingston A400 can be found on the manufacturer's website. According to him, in addition to drives with a capacity of 120 and 240 GB, this line also contains drives of 480 GB, 960 GB and 1.92 TB. In addition, the drives of this model differ in operating speed (more on that later) and form factor - in addition to 2.5", there is also M.2. The interface for all options is SATA III, the memory type is 3D NAND. The case of Kingston A400 drives is made of painted metal. Still, holding metal hardware is more pleasant than plastic, from which cases are now made for many SSDs. At the same time, the weight of Kingston A400 drives is about 40 g, which is comparable to plastic drives. The capacity of both drives corresponds to those declared by the manufacturer: the Kingston A400 240 GB contains 240,057,409,536 bytes, the Kingston A400 120 GB contains 120,034,123,776 bytes. Some operating systems show 223.6 GiB and 111.8 GiB respectively (yes, GiB, not GB). As for the speed. The manufacturer on its website indicates that the 120 GB Kingston A400 processes compressible data at speeds up to 500 MB / s when reading and up to 320 MB / s when writing. At the same time, the Kingston A400 with a capacity of 240 reads compressible data at the same speed as the "younger" modification, and writes a little faster - 350 MB / s. A slightly higher speed in data processing speed for larger SSDs of the same line is the norm. But my tests showed slightly different results. In the compressible data test, the 120 GB drive showed the best results. Moreover, in working with small blocks, this difference is especially noticeable. In the test with incompressible data, the results turned out to be somewhat different. Large blocks are clearly processed faster, small ones differently. I also want to pay attention to the recording test of the Kingston A400 240 GB, made in HD Tune. The schedule turned out to be very unstable, with constant jumps. This behavior is unusual for a new SSD. The 120 GB graphics card is much smoother. However, I suspect that different batches of drives use different memory modules and controllers, so the results of speed tests can vary greatly. And if this is not a sign of marriage, then for domestic use such tricks in the Kingston A400 240 GB, it seems to me, do not matter much. As for real work. Of course, replacing old hard drives on both the laptop and the PC led to an increase in performance. The difference is especially noticeable on an almost brand new PC. For example, launching LibreOffice (a free analogue of Microsoft Office) instead of 15 seconds now takes a second and a half at most. And this is with a 240-gigabyte, which puzzled me in the tests. In general, there is an increase in productivity, in some cases quite tangible. Given the low cost of drives, there are no special complaints about them. For office work and a not too demanding home user, they will fit.