Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Kingston A400 120G Internal SSD M.2 2280 SA400M8/120G

Top positive review

Do not listen to the bad reviews.

Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2019

After reading a review by a DGS fellow that said he had 30 years in the tech business, I thought this was a real P.O.S.. Well, a little while ago my Ex called me up because she was having some issues with her computer and wanted me to look at it. Being the sap I am, I said ok. Turns out the HDD was bad. The bells went off and I remembered the review left buy the tech guy in Florida and I thought "Eureka!". I would get this SSD for her system and within a few days her computer would explode like a dumpster full of TNT.
I get the SSD not on time but a full day early in fact. It installs super easy and she comes and picks it up. I have to hide my excitement as I just wait to hear about the evil that is to come. So after about a week I get anxious and call the Ex to see what was up. Her "Boy Toy" answers and gives me the dreaded news. Not only is it still running, but it is super fast and efficient. He then proceeds to thank me and compliment me on "How mature" it was of me to do this for her even after how messy the divorce was. And how good of a person I really was for being the bigger person and all of that.
Long story short, if your looking for a piece of hardware to sabotage your Ex's computer with, this is not it. But, if you are looking for a stable SSD on the cheap to add some performance to your system, well, sadly this is in fact it.

2,816 people found this helpful

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Steven A Carpentier

Not a Boot Drive

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2018

Physical installation was a breeze. Open the case, plug it in, and the computer saw it.

However.

I bought this to install my Linux operating system. After multiple attempts I was finally able to install the system. I have installed Linux on multiple drives, on multiple computers, and this is the first time I had to fight with the installation. As it turns out, this drive is not natively configured to be a boot drive, which is why I had such a time with the installation, and which is why I do not have a menu on bootup asking which operating system to boot (I have a 250 GB SSD running Windows 10). The only purpose for purchasing an SSD of this size is to install only an operating system, and since it wasn't configured as a boot drive then it ultimately fails at its ONE job. Yes, I have it working; that said, on a functional bootable drive I automatically get a menu asking which OS to boot. On this one, I have to enter UEFI and go to the boot menu and select the drive to boot from. It's an incredible disappointment after my experience with the 250 GB SSD I purchased.

255 people found this helpful

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Steven A Carpentier

Not a Boot Drive

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2018

Style: SATA3Capacity: 120 GBVerified Purchase

255 people found this helpful

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DGS Florida

Kingston A400 SSD 480GB Stay away!

Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2018

Style: SATA3Capacity: 480 GBVerified Purchase

As a 30-year+ computer guy, this is the only SSD drive I have ever purchased which worked perfectly when installed but failed totally with 2 weeks. I seriously recommend you spend a few more dollars and purchase a more dependable drive. While Kingston replaced the drive, (unit was outside the Amazon 30-day limit but was in my inventory a couple of months before I used it) I had to pay return shipping charges plus I now have another which I do not trust to use with a customer. Why did I buy it? Low sale price.

184 people found this helpful

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Persepolis

CAUTION: READ BEFORE YOU BUY!

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2019

Style: SATA3Capacity: 480 GBVerified Purchase

I would highly advise against buying this model drive for anything other than a disposable setup with no important data on it (if given the drive for free).

I've purchased 3 of these so far, and here is my experience:
Drive #1: After about 1300 hours of use became catatonic. You can see partitions, but if you attempt to write to the drive it dies... and never comes back until a cold boot.
Drive #2: After about 1500 hours of use starts exhibiting the 5-30 second "lockup" or hanging issue. Other people have reported this with the A400 (search online for "a400 problem 100%"). This happens every few minutes rendering the machine unusable for most tasks. SMART also reports 1 unrecoverable error.
Drive #3: So far operating ok.

Drive #1 was running firmware SBFKB1C2, and the others are SBFKB1C3.

Given the above data, the A400 drive is showing a 60% failure rate at my sample size... heck that number makes the ST3000DM001 look "reliable" in comparison (another notorious drive with large double digit failure rates).

I ended up pulling the A400's, and replacing with with Samsung 860's... and all problems disappeared. Unfortunately I was outside of the return period so I'm eating $140 on this lesson.

My Advice: no matter how good the price of the A400 drive may be, the failure rate isn't worth it... buy something else.

115 people found this helpful

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Timothy D. Williams

The reviews don't tell the whole story

Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2019

Style: SATA3Capacity: 240 GBVerified Purchase

Basically, this drive works for 90% of people. But for 10%, it has some huge issues.

Before I go into the technical details, let me preface it with a simple statement: no other SSD has this unique set of compatibility issues. None. I've never seen a firmware reject various system configs in such a way since SSD's went mainstream with the Intel X25-M in 2009.

So as you might guess, this drive has firmware issues. To Kingstons' credit, they have attempted (numerous times) to correct it. I can tell there have been at least 4 revisions. Note: the drives I received from Amazon in November 2019 have the latest firmware.

The issue for Kingston is they inherently shot themselves in the foot trying to support this drive. Kingston has been notorious, most famously with the A300, for changing components in drives without relabeling them. Everything from NAND brands and type to complete controllers. The A400 suffers the same issue, so they are dealing with a compounded situation of firmware bugs across a variety of specifications. Which is why they can't completely fix it for ALL drives, because the fixes don't apply to ALL drives.

Now that alone has scared people off the brand, and it should scare you away too. Who would buy a product with said specifications when they are likely to receive something entirely different? Well, that's the Kingston way, and it is in plain sight because in Kingston fashion: they NEVER list specifications for their products other than performance. Kingston never reveals the controller, cache package, NAND brand or type, or overall reference design. Because they are well aware they plan to change it based on what is available to them for their packaging budget.

Now that I'm done rightfully thrashing Kingstons' business ethics, onto the drive.

I ordered 6 of these: (2) 480GB and (4) 240GB. I can say the 480GB is less problematic. But one was problematic and two 240GB drives were unusable. On the other hand, two 240GB drives installed perfectly and run fine to this day.

The problem machines: Dell Vostro 260 Pentium G630 (H61 chipset seems to bring out a SATA LPC bug) and any AMD chipset seems to have a SATA bug as well, as reported in various forums around the web. So basically avoid putting these drives in older machines that are NOT SATA3 (6Gbps) or any AMD PC.

Well, that eliminates the majority of the target audience for an entry level drive.

Verified working PC's: HP Elitebook 840 G1 (laptop H81 variant) and Dell Inspiron 15 5000 (recent Intel 8th Gen Pentium - probably 370 series chipset variant)

Behavior: <HDD transfer rates reading\writing - doesn't matter if SLC flushes, transfer rates are still horrible. The malfunctional SATA link causes the system to stall randomly, for 10-60 seconds at a time while the drive attempts to flush a stalled queue. You know its a SATA link error because the HDD light blinks or even goes near solid. If the SLC were dumping, garbage collection were occurring of the controller were bogged down, you WOULD NOT see SATA activity for this.

This drive should be pulled from the market.

UPDATE 9/26/2020
A 240GB drive failed today less than a year into service in a very light-use office PC. Lenovo T30 circa 2010 Workstation with a X58 chipset. Probably retiring the PC, due to overall age, but the drive got us to that point, not the other components which still serve the roll as a basic office PC in a warehouse handling shipping labels and timeclock software. Should never have gambled with these drives. Fortunately the machine was entirely backed up to the cloud using Backblaze.

43 people found this helpful

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Fidele

Easy to install but broke after 5 months

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2018

Style: SATA3Capacity: 480 GBVerified Purchase

It was easy to install and I could definitely see the difference having my operating system on it. However it stopped working after 5 months. Tried everything and after troubleshooting, I found out it has bad sectors that can't be repaired

25 people found this helpful

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Springbreeze

DOA. Stay away!

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2019

Style: SATA3Capacity: 240 GBVerified Purchase

DOA. The computer does not recognize the hard drive. I tried different computers to no avail. I ordered 2 of this at the same time because of its cheap price, but both are DOA. Very disappointed. Never had this kind of experience from amazon.com. I had purchased the same product 4 weeks ago which is working so far, and that's why I purchased 2 additional ones. I will stay away from this one from now on.

16 people found this helpful

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Eric Broderick

You get what you pay for... A basic, cheap SSD

Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2018

Style: SATA3Capacity: 120 GBVerified Purchase

Yes, this is a solid state drive, however this drive is a VALUE drive, as far as SSDs go, this one is quite slow, the best I can get out of it is 313 read and 191 write... technically faster than a mechanical drive by leaps and bounds, there are faster drives out there that are better bang for your buck.

If you are looking for a cheap SSD to say increase the speed of an old laptop and dont want to dump a bunch of money into a SSD thats full speed cant / wont be fully utilized then this is the drive for you. But if you are looking for a primary boot drive for your gaming desktop or new laptop then please spend the extra cash and get a Samsung Evo.

Also Kingstons SSDTool Box will NOT see this drive.

12 people found this helpful

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Liam P.

Doesn't work.

Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2018

Style: SATA3Capacity: 120 GBVerified Purchase

I hate to write a negative review especially with a brand that I normally never have problems with and quite enjoy their products. I bought this SSD thinking it was a really good deal for a storage device at the time. However with the SSD drive I recieved I have found that it will not connect to my computer, it doesn't show up in BIOS or device management. I've tried multiple ports and even a different computer entirely and nothing's getting it to show up. I'm not sure if there's a way that I can fix this but if I can and I will rewrite this review.

17 people found this helpful

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Shaye

Great for Boot Drive and Non critical Data.

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2019

Style: SATA3Capacity: 120 GBVerified Purchase

I got this drive on sale for $17 which was a steal! The drive at 120GB is only about big enough to put an operating system and a few games or programs on which is what I did. I bought two of these and installed them in a recording pc and a entertainment pc as Operating System drives. As an upgrade over the 6 year old 7200 HDDs it was amazing (though anyone why knows about pcs could tell you that.)

Boot times went from over 2 minutes per PC to literally about 10-15 seconds! Also I can open programs right away instead of letting the pc idle a few minutes before even attempting.

The reason I don't give a perfect rating is I personally know Kingston as a budget drive manufacturer that may cut corners to keep prices down. That doesn't mean they exactly make bad drives, but that I wouldn't trust this drive with irreplaceable data. For that I favor Samsung.

That aside I still would of gave it 4 stars but they don't include any type of drive cloning software meaning unless you have some already you could be spending hours and hours trying to do a drive swap that should take minutes as was my case. Once again that is why I like Samsung, they include a drive cloner that works with their drives amazingly.

The fact the company doesn't offer that at all for these drives is a joke. You want more happy Customers Kingston, then start including some.

5 people found this helpful

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Avtandili

Has Thermal Throttling or cache memory on the board is very small.

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2020

Style: M.2 2280Capacity: 240 GBVerified Purchase

Cristal Disk Mark showes good values. But ....
Let's see what happens in real world...
When M2 is just plugged, temperature is about 30 grad celsius.
When writing something a big file for example 17GB size, the speed in the beginning is good, about 300MB/s. (see the video).
But after 4-5GB written, the speed dramatically drops to 90-100MB/s. Controller sensor shows about 49 grad celsius. Maximum temperature that I've seen (measured via laser thermometer) near the M2 slot in the Kingston's capacitors is 61 grad celsius.
Well.. Verdict.. If you don't care about promissed writting speed from kingston, maybe this cheap version is the best. But if you plan to use it frequently in file transfering from one device to another, maybe 100MB/s is very slow for you. Anyway I'm not satified.

4 people found this helpful

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