Small success for Kingston, which has announced a key milestone in the supply of SSDs. The company has published a press release announcing that it has shipped over 100 million A400 SSDs. A clearly significant figure, demonstrating the success of the manufacturer’s range. On the other hand, Kingston is offering particularly aggressive prices.
A400: 100 million units shipped!
A classic 3.5″ SSD!
With this series of SSDs, the brand offers us a 2.5″ model with a SATA interface. It’s not a recent model either, as the range was launched in January 2018, so it celebrated its 8th birthday this year.
Unfortunately, this range is rather tricky to tackle, as there are several versions of the same hardware. Some models benefit from a Phison S11 controller, others from a Silicon Motion SM2259XT2 while there are versions with Micro TLC, Toshiba TLC or even Intel QLC and even YMTC TLC. In short, versions launched to adapt to the constraints of the moment.
In all cases, we’re talking about classic SATA SSD performance, with sequential read speeds of 500 MB/s and write speeds of 450 MB/s. Random performance is 90,000 IOPS for reading, compared with 50,000 IOPS for writing. As for endurance, we’re talking 300 TBW for the 960 GB model.
Affordable prices:
Obviously, prices are more affordable than those of a current PCIe SSD, but data rates are also much lower, as we’ve seen. On the other hand, it’s also prices that contribute to a product’s success. You can have the best SSD on the market, but if it’s too expensive, it won’t sell and you won’t reach 100 million shipments. Well, in the current climate, these A400s are less affordable than they used to be.
At present, the whole range is no longer available on the market, or is hard to find in France. Let’s just say that the 240GB, 480GB and 960GB versions are still easy to find, while the 120GB and 1.9TB models are harder to come by.
