Kingston A400 SA400S37/480G 480 GB

One of the cheapest SSDs on the market

The Kingston A400 is one of the cheapest SSDs you can find on the market. Naturally, this fact left an imprint on the production of the drive and a potential buyer will have to come to terms with some nuances in the work.

Full compatibility with MacBook

Unlike its predecessor, the UV400 drive, the updated A400 uses a Phison PS3111-S11 instead of a Marvell controller. On the one hand, this gave full compatibility with Apple laptops. On the other hand, due to the limited cache (only 32 MB), the A400 can simultaneously process fewer small files than its competitors. The record IOPS indicator is only 35K, against the standard 50 – 60K. And the SLC array of the A400, like other SSDs on the Phison S11, is limited to 8 GB, so when copying large files like 1080p movies and game images, the speed will sag from the claimed 450 MB / s to 140 – 150 MB / s. The reading speed is consistently high, which is kept at a consistently high rate of 500 MB / s.

For undemanding users

Given all of the above, first of all, we would recommend this model for undemanding users who want to get the basic benefits of switching from HDD to SSD: low file access time, high speed of loading programs and the operating system. If the system requirements are high, then it would be better to pay extra for the conditional Samsung Evo 860.