Kingston SSDNow A400 480GB Internal Solid State Drive (SA400S37/480GIN)

I have a dell vostro 1015 which i purchased more than 9 years ago. At first, i was skeptical whether i should put an SSD into it because:1) i use this laptop for occasional video watching and net surfing. WFH from this laptop was a nightmare.2) it runs on SATA 2 connection which will be a real bottleneck in its speed.I didn't want to purchase a new laptop as it will not have any usability. so i thought maybe i should proceed with this. Truthfully, best decision i ever made for my laptop. Boot time decreased significantly, apps launch without any delay..... operating the laptop is now fun in itself.So, i went ahead, upgraded the ram from 2 to 4gig(that was maximum it cud be upgraded to), cleaned my laptop and bought a new battery, and now i think it can serve me for 3-4 more years before it cud be retired.If you are planning to buy an ssd, just go ahead...trust me, it's a boon for the laptops. Its lightweight, power-saving and lightning fast.

This ssd is extremely fast. I replaced it with my laptop 5400rpm hdd. Sony vaio vpceh35en. Now my laptop is as fast as new ThinkPad or Apple laptops, though my processor is 2nd gen i3 with 2 cores, 2.3ghz. After putting this ssd my laptop boot time reduced and now it boots within a few seconds, white previously it used to take more than 2 minutes. Any large softwares like Photoshop cs6, premier pro cs6, Illustrator cs6, Eclipse, Android Studio, Adobe pdf, Chrome browser, Firefox, Opera, Word,Excel, PowerPoint, etc fully within max 3-5sec, which previously used to take almost a minute to launch specially after boot. Write speed has also increase but I have not measured yet so cannot give any opinion. Even my battery backup increased so much. Previously while booting the laptop battery reduces to 7%-8% but now it reduces only 1% -2%. It's because ssd has no physical moving parts while hdd has small motor which makes the disc rotate. In ssd all the data are always ready to use but in hdd it has to search the data throughout the disc by rotating it which results slowness. The ssd is very light in weight compared to the hdd. But my product came to my with a torned packed. Shame on you appario retail. Another point is that I am using it on Windows 7, if you use this on Windows 10 then you can more faster boot time and faster app launch time because Windows 10 is a very optimized OS compare to Windows 7 and MacOs. If you have a good processor and high speed ram with Windows 10 then I can assure you that using this ssd you laptop or PC will run many times faster than Macbook pro. Though MacBook pro has m.2 nvme ssd but Windows 10 is more optimized.

Having used this SSD for over five years, it's clear that it was a solid investment. The drive's performance has remained consistent, with fast boot times, quick file transfers, and reliable multitasking capabilities. Even after years of use, there are no signs of significant slowdown, which is impressive.One of the standout features of this SSD is its durability. Despite daily use, there have been no issues with data integrity or unexpected failures. The drive has maintained its health, showing minimal wear according to monitoring tools. This long-term reliability makes it a great choice for anyone looking to upgrade their storage.On the downside, the storage capacity may now feel a bit limited compared to more modern SSDs, which offer larger capacities at lower prices. Additionally, newer SSD models may offer faster speeds, but this drive still holds up well for most tasks.Overall, this SSD has proven to be a reliable and durable option over the years, offering great performance for its time and showing minimal degradation even after extensive use.

Good quality SS Drive

Few terms that you should be familiar with:TLC (Triple level cell): Single NAND cell can store 3 bits, therefore SSD will be cheaper, slower and deteriorate faster but will have higher capacity in similarly dense SLC/MLC SSDs. (You don't need to worry about SSD wear, this SSD is rated for at least 1 million hours MTBF.Dual channel controller: Basically two concurrent streams of data querying capacity.DRAM cache: High speed memory embedded on SSD to speedup access time of frequently accessed files.Kingston SA400 is a TLC Dual Controller Single Core (Phison PS3111-S11, last gen's most popular controller) SSD with no DRAM cache, pretty much the cheapest SSD can go.Therefore it is slower and dumber as compared to Samsung 860 EVO, Kingston UV500, Crucial MX500. But it's also extremely cheaper.The attached image shows the read and write speed of the SSD but these numbers are mostly misleading. If you are going for a SSD just to speed up the overall experience and snappiness of the OS, you should be looking for 4KB Queue depth of 1 and single threaded workload's read and write speed because that's the most common work load.Now, a typical 5400 RPM HDD will have 4KiB Q1T1 speeds around 0.5 MiBPS read and 1.5 MiBPS write whereas you can see in the image that this SSD has ~35 MiBPS read and ~82 MiBPS write which is exponentially faster than HDD.So, going with this SDD will have an exponential increase in speed as compared to HDD, while going for MLC/SLC SSD with DRAM cache and dual channel controller will have marginal increase in speed as compared to this SSD but a much more increase in cost.Therefore, if you are tight on budget, go with this SSD without a doubt. But, if you have a specialized workload that can take advantage of higher queue depth speeds, multi threaded performance or sequential speeds and you have no issue in spending the extra money then go for more expensive ones. But, I would suggest to go with extremely high performing SSD like NVMe ones that directly communicate with the CPU using PCIe lanes, if you really want something above SA400.