Kingston A400 M.2 SSD Budget Review

Hello. Today I want to talk about the budget M.2 SSD available to everyone. We will talk about the well-known Kingston A400 drive model, but made only in the 2280 form factor. In the review, we will see what speed the new product demonstrates and how things are going with heating.

Get an offer for Kingston A400 M.2

Characteristics

As always, the manufacturer gives a three-year warranty and free technical support for the new product. I have a 240 GB solid state drive in my hands. Supplied in plain blister pack. The front side states that this SSD is 10 times faster than conventional hard drives. The Kingston A400 itself in the M.2 form factor is located in the center of the package and looks through a transparent window.

On the back of the package is a sticker indicating the volume of the disc and the country of origin. It also shows SATA II and USB 2.0 compatibility via an adapter.

Inside, the Kingston A400 itself is in a plastic container. Instructions not included. There is also no promo code for installing Acronis True Image HD, which I saw on another Kingston A1000 SSD. The dimensions of the disk are 22 * ​​80 * 1.35 mm, and the weight is 6.7 g. On the blue board, the memory chips are installed on one side, and four Toshiba TLC memory arrays are typed at 240 GB. The budget and time-tested Phison PS3111-S11 is used as a controller. There is nothing on the back.

Kingston A400 SSD will be tested on the following system:

Once connected, the drive must be initialized using the operating system. After that, the SSD becomes visible. The end user becomes 223 GB available.

To work with the drive, proprietary Kingston SSD Manager software is used, which allows you to update the firmware. At the time of writing, no newer version was found available.

At idle, the temperature is 38 degrees. In this case, the disk is located under the video card, and not next to the processor, where it can be additionally cooled by a cooler. During testing, the maximum temperature rose to 54 degrees, and the maximum operating temperature is declared 70 degrees.

In CrystalDiskMark, I tested files as small as 1 GB and beyond 16 GB to begin with. We see that in the second case, the speed drops due to cache filling.

In user testing, I copied a 22.7 GB folder from a Kingston A1000 SSD to that drive and the speed stayed in the region of 350 MB/s during the copy, and when there was 14 GB left to transfer, the speed dropped to 86 MB/s. s and then grew slightly to 106MB/s. The maximum heating temperature of the Kingston A400 was 54 degrees.

If we summarize the Kingston A400 SSD in the M.2 form factor, it is worth noting that the speeds declared by the manufacturer have been confirmed. We’ve got the same popular 2.5″ SATA SSD in the new 2280 chassis. The SSD’s operating temperature is set to 70 degrees, but with proper case venting, you’ll never see those numbers. The maximum during the preparation of the review was 56 degrees. If you are faced with the choice of replacing your hard drive with a modern, fast and compact drive, but do not want the purchase to hit your wallet hard, then the Kingston A400 is your choice because the 240GB model is available for about 2000 rubles.