Kingston A400 SSD Internal Solid State Drive 2.5" SATA Rev 3.0, 960GB - SA400S37/960G

I bought the Kingston A400 SSD specifically to upgrade the aging HDD in an old PS3, aiming for faster loading times and overall responsiveness. While the A400 might not be cutting-edge by today's blazing NVMe standards, it proves to be an absolutely excellent and incredibly cheap upgrade for older tech that still relies on 2.5-inch hard drives.The difference in an older system, like a PS3, is immediately noticeable. Game loading times are significantly reduced, and general system navigation feels much snappier compared to a traditional spinning hard drive. It truly breathes new life into devices that were once bottlenecked by slow storage.Beyond consoles, this SSD would also make for fast, cheap, and reliable storage for regular files if you need to replace a failing HDD in an older laptop or desktop, or even as a dedicated drive for less demanding applications. I've had no problems with reliability so far, and the speeds are exactly as expected for a SATA III SSD of this generation.Overall: If you're looking to provide a meaningful speed boost to an older laptop, desktop, or even a classic console like the PS3 that utilizes 2.5-inch drives, the Kingston A400 SSD is a superb choice. It offers fantastic value for money, reliable performance, and significantly improves the user experience without breaking the bank. Highly recommended for revitalizing older hardware.

I needed a new SSD as I currently have a 10 year old hard drive and wanted a dedicated storage medium to hold all my Steam games. With games taking up 100GB each these days, I went with 1TB for a great price so I could store my important games on this SSD. Due to the solid state technology, games boot super fast and the SSD definitely doesn't bottleneck your system. I already have an NVME M.2 as my boot drive, so this was perfect to install round the back of my motherboard tray, hidden away and keeps my games safety and securely stored.

Worked exactly as expected. Fast and got the job done.Kind note, this SSD is only 960GB not 1TB so be careful when cloning a 1TB as you need to shrink the original partitions first for a successful cloning.

Bought this for £15 and arrived by 10pm same day.Service was amazing, price was amazing at £15 for an SSD of this spec.The package arrived promptly and was well packaged in a sealed card what you may expect from a micro SD. The device didn't come with any screws or anything, just the physical 2.5" style drive and the printed packaging.It was an easy swap out on the laptop and the screws / process to install in physical device and software worked with out problems. It was notably slower than a modern m2 style ssd but compared to the likes of Samsung Evo, the difference was marginal. This was bought to replace an aging mechanical hdd which instantly showed a performance boost.Boot times halved (About 10 seconds on Win 11)Opening programs such as Chrome / MS Word was 1-2 seconds on low load and about 4-5 seconds on high load which was likely more RAM constrained.Doing a basic file transfer it took about a minute to transfer a couple of gig from one location to another. After extensive use, It is still running strong, I wouldn't advise it's use for gaming, however; to give that old laptop or PC a new lease of life, it is well worth the £15-25 price tag.I purchased the 240 GB which was more than sufficient for the purpose and if anyone wants a reasonable 240gb ssd portable, you could buy this and small usb 3.1 hdd caddy for about £8 to have a well performing portable.

I have a 5-year-old Dell laptop with a conventional hard disk, 4GB RAM and a Pentium 4415 CPU with a CPU Mark of 2244. It's quite slow running Windows 10 - particularly launching apps.So I upgraded the RAM from 4GB to 12GB and launching was around 80% faster i.e. apps that took 60 seconds now took around 40 seconds; better, not bad for £15. Swapping between launched apps was faster too, but there was still a long sluggish period after launching Windows during which disk activity (reported by Task Manager) was around 100%; setting up the swap file?(I bought the RAM upgrade from Crucial Memory UK, running its compatibility tester on my laptop to be sure I bought the right thing. I'm allowed to mention Crucial because they sent me to Amazon to buy their RAM when I decided to purchase. An excellent system, win-win. I'll add a review for the RAM too.)Anyway, time to upgrade the disk. Shopping around for an SSD, the Kingston A400 was a lot cheaper than my usual source of SSDs, and I've often bought memory from them - so worth a try. It's a bare drive, no screws or brackets - although you do get a year's free use of the Acronis disk tools.Anyway, installing the SSD in the laptop should be straightforward, but I wanted to SWAP the hard disk out, so needed to clone it to the A400 first, which was trickier. First I needed to download the Kingston disk management tools to get access to the Acronis software on the laptop, then I needed to connect the A400 to a second SATA port on the laptop - which does not have a second SATA port of course. Been here before! I have a USB-to-SATA adaptor for just such situations, used that.HINT: There are other ways to clone the disk, such as using the Acronis software to create an image file, so you don't HAVE to buy a USB to SATA adaptor, but those other methods are a bit more complex.Getting the Acronis disk cloning tool to work took patience, it took multiple attempts. I *think* my laptop was downloading a Windows update in the middle of this, not sure. (HINT: Remember to disconnect from the internet or suspend Windows Updates first.) Anyway, it did work on my fifth attempt, taking around 30 minutes.Phew. With the laptop disk cloned, I could open up the laptop and swap the A400 for the hard disk. Upgrades complete, the old laptop is transformed. Window start-up and app launching is now TWO to FOUR times faster and switching between launched apps is almost instantaneous. And there's no sluggish period when Windows starts up, the SSD is fast enough to power through the swap file setup; it's only 5-10% busy rather than 100%.I am very happy. Before the upgrades, my old laptop was painfully slow to use (and, in truth, it always was). With extra memory and the Kingston SSD it's entirely usable once again. And oh so portable.It's hard for me to be certain how effective the SSD upgrade would have been on its own, but I estimate that even without the RAM upgraded (from 4GB to 12GB) it would have made the laptop much more usable, as Windows hammers that disk - not just for storage but also for virtual memory (swap file)