Kingston A400 SA400S37/240G 240 GB

Now for Apple

Kingston A400 is one of the cheapest SSDs in east european retail. He came to replace the UV400 model and turned out to be better in some ways, worse in some ways. An indisputable advantage is the transition from the Marvell controller to Phison, thanks to which the disk became compatible, among other things, with Apple MacBook laptops (unless, of course, a particular model has a 2.5-inch disk format, and not M.2).

Savings on operating

Another thing is that in order to save money, the Phison S11 low-cost controller was chosen with its own small RAM cache — only 32 MB. For comparison, the old Kingston UV400, as well as modern slightly more expensive SSDs on SMI controllers, have a separate 256-512 MB RAM chip. As a result, the A400 can process fewer small files (temporary files of the operating system and web browser) at the same time than its competitors.

For many years

The choice in favor of cheap TLC flash memory with three bits per cell was not surprising. For low-cost and even many mid-price SSDs, this has long become the standard. Its real durability turned out to be significantly higher than predicted, which allows you not to think about replacing the SSD for at least four to five years.

Number scams

But note that the average sequential write speed of TLC memory outside the virtual SLC array (cells are programmatically combined by three) is much less than the peak one: only 70 versus 350 MB / s. And the SLC array of the A400, like other SSDs on the Phison S11, is small — only 4 GB for the 256 GB model. When copying large files (movies, games), the speed will sag. The write speed is consistently high — 500 MB / s. Given these nuances, we can only recommend Kingston A400 for purchase to picky PC users, for whom saving money is more important than speed.