Kingston A400 120GB M.2 SSD

Description

KINGSTON A400 120GB M.2 SSD

KINGSTON A400 120GB M.2 SSD

Add speed and storage capacity to desktops and laptops with an SSD. An entry level SSD is roughly 10x faster than a typical 7200RPM hard drive. By replacing the existing HDD in your laptop or desktop you can increase speed and storage capacity with one cost effective upgrade. If you want even faster performance, or want to take advantage of PCIe technology, explore the full range of Kingston SSDs to find the one that best meets your performance, storage and budget criteria. SSDs are also a great upgrade option for laptops, because they are more energy efficient, which can lengthen battery life. An SSD is also more durable than a traditional hard disk drive because it has no moving parts. As a result, data on a laptop with an SSD is more likely to survive being dropped than a laptop with an HDD.

Kingston’s A400 solid-state drive dramatically improves the responsiveness of your existing system with incredible boot, loading and transfer times compared to mechanical hard drives. Powered by a latest-gen controller for read and write speeds of up to 500MB/s and 450MB/s1, this SSD is 10x faster than a traditional hard drive for higher performance, ultra-responsive multi-tasking and an overall faster system. Also more reliable and durable than a hard drive, A400 is available in multiple capacities from 120GB–1.92TB2.

• Fast start-up, loading and file transfers
• More reliable and durable than a hard drive
• Multiple capacities with space for applications or a hard drive replacement

Solid-State Drives (SSDs)

In the past few years, the cost of NAND flash dropped enough to make new primary storage devices such as solid-state drives possible for client systems and servers.
SSDs offer significant performance and durability advantages over standard hard drives. SSDs have no moving parts; they are all semiconductor devices. Because of this, SSDs do not suffer from mechanical latencies like hard drives do. Since they have no moving parts, SSDs can be subjected to much more shock and vibration than a hard drive, which makes them ideal for a broad range of portable and mobile applications.

In the past, solid-state drives were designed with DRAM memory chips and were expensive, making them suitable only for demanding server applications.

Today, with lower costs of NAND flash, SSDs are being used in a variety of applications, ranging from consumer to enterprise and military computing.

U.2 SSD in a server caddy pulled halfway out of a server storage bay

SSD Endurance

Kingston uses NAND flash memory with an endurance rating designed for the workload of an SSD. This allows Kingston to offer a variety of SSDs for an application at a competitive price point.

Kingston’s client and enterprise SSDs come with a lifetime endurance rating to help match the SSD to the intended workload. For client SSDs, Kingston provides a TBW (Terabytes Written) specification that enables users to predict the useful life of the SSD in their application.

Kingston enterprise SSDs are also rated with a TBW specification, as well as a DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) specification that is based on the TBW and warranty period of the SSD. For example, a 1TB SSD that has an endurance rating of 1DWPD means that a user can write 1TB of data per day to the SSD for 5 years. The TBW/DWPD specification is a tool for corporate customers who deploy Kingston SSDs in their enterprise environments as part of their IT infrastructure planning.

Kingston provides a software utility called KSM (Kingston Storage Manager) to track SSD life expectancy. Think of it as a fuel gauge in a car, with which the user can periodically check the status of the SSD.

SSD Performance

Most client systems are no longer limited by processor performance. They are almost always limited by storage. Hard drives have access latencies in milliseconds, while SSDs operate in hundreds of microseconds.

An SSD can deliver new life and high performance even on systems that are a few years old (if they have a SATA compatible interface). A Windows®-based system can see its boot-up times cut from many minutes to one or less, making an SSD a performance storage upgrade. Overall, it often delivers the best performance increase of any upgrade to a system.