Preface | Kingston A400 solid state drive
▲Not long ago, a friend asked me: What should I pay attention to when buying a laptop? I told her without thinking: I need a solid state drive. Regardless of whether you buy one with a solid state drive or upgrade it yourself, if your laptop does not have a solid state drive, its performance will be cut in half. I have been using laptops for many years since I started working, and I have replaced them no less than 5 times. Every laptop died due to lag and unable to work normally. During this period, there was no shortage of reinstalling the system, replacing the CPU, adding memory, cleaning dust and other operations, but nothing improved. Finally, the old mechanical hard drive was replaced by a solid state drive. solve. Because a lot of work data is in the old mechanical hard drive, I simply made a mobile hard drive as a backup. Nowadays, computers at home and at work all use solid-state drives. If you use mechanical hard drives and solid-state drives alternately every day, the difference will really drive you crazy. Let me share with you the Kingston A400 solid state drive provided by Peripheral Tianxia Zhongtai. Through software and actual experience, we can see how much the solid state drive is improved compared to the mechanical hard drive.
packaging | Kingston A400 solid state drive
▲The outer packaging of Kingston A400 solid state adheres to the style of the King family. It is directly sealed in hard plastic like the U disk packaging. However, there is no anti-tamper seal on the edge of the package. I hope the manufacturer will add it to prevent someone from selling used products to others.
▲ There is a product manual on the back of the package, and a 3-year warranty introduction in the upper left corner. Because there is an anti-tamper sticker on the hard drive, you must not disassemble it yourself and void the warranty. There is a label affixed by the dealer in the lower right corner. The origin is Taiwan, China, and the dealer is Shanghai Zanhe Yingtai.
▲ On the front of the package, the product model A400 is in the upper left corner, and the capacity is 240G in the upper right corner. The bottom is marked 2.5 inches, SATA Rev.3.0 (6Gb/s). I have some thoughts here. It would be better if the manufacturer could provide a SATA data cable as standard, so you don’t have to buy it separately.
Appearance | Kingston A400 SSD
▲Kingston A400 SSD is gray in color, with a fine frosted surface. There is Kingston's LOGO in the middle of the front, and four screws are fixed around it. There is an anti-tamper warranty label on the one in the lower right corner. The product serial number is affixed to the bottom and can be checked with the serial number on the packaging.
▲The four screw holes on the outside of the back of the hard drive are used to fix the chassis or hard drive cage, and the four screws on the inside are used to fix the hard drive PCB board.
▲There is a product nameplate under the backrest. On the nameplate, you can see the origin of Taiwan, product model, input 5V, 1A, and capacity 240G.
▲There are interfaces on the top of the hard disk. The short one is the "L" type SATA data interface, and the long one is the "L" type SATA power interface. The interface has a fool-proof design. If the direction is wrong, it cannot be plugged in.
▲There are two screw holes on each side of the solid state for fixing to the chassis or hard drive cage.
parameter specifications | Kingston A400 solid state drive
[Product specifications]:
▲This is the product specification, the detailed parameters are as follows:
Appearance size: r 2.5"
Interface: SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) - Can be backward compatible with SATA Rev. 2.0 (3Gb/s)
Storage Capacity: 240GB
Controller: 2Ch3
NAND: TLC
Baseline Performance: Data Transfer (ATTO) 240GB — Up to 500MB/s read and 350MB/s write
Power consumption: 0.195W (idle) ) / 0.279W (average) / 0.642W (max) read / 1.535W (max) write
Storage temperature: -40°C~85°C
Operating temperature: 0°C~70°C
Size: 100.0mm x 69.9MM
Warranty/Support: 3-year warranty, free technical support
Total written bytes: (TBW) 5, 240GB: 80TB
▲ Because of the 3-year warranty, I did not disassemble it.It can be seen from the disassembly diagrams of others on the Internet that the main control chip is Phison PS3111-S11, the model is CP33238B, supports dual channels, and the maximum capacity supports 1TB. The flash memory chips are 15nm TLC NAND from Toshiba, with a single capacity of 64GB, two in the front and two in the back.
▲The weight of Kingston A400 is 41g, which is roughly the same price as seven 1-yuan coins. Compared with my 435g Western Digital T blue disk , the weight is less than one-tenth of it.
▲In terms of product parameters, the solid thickness is 7mm. After comparison, it is thinner than four 1-yuan coins. Compared with the 26mm of a mechanical hard drive, the thickness is less than one-third.
▲After actual measurement, the length of Kingston A400 SSD is about 100mm and the width is about 69mm, which is consistent with the official data. It is much smaller than the mechanical hard drive which is 147mm long and 101mm wide.
installation | Kingston A400 solid state drive
▲This is my PC hardware configuration, the CPU is E3-1230V3, the motherboard is Gigabyte G1.Sniper B5, the graphics card is GTX960, the memory is DDR3 1600MHZ 8G single, and the hard disk is Plextor M5S-128G , Western Digital T blue disk, Seagate 2T, Kingston A400-240G, the radiator is Cooler Master B120i, the power supply is Cooler Master V550, and the chassis is Cooler Master MasterCase Maker 5T. The configuration is a bit outdated, but the performance is still sufficient. You can still play large-scale stand-alone games and mainstream online games. Currently, I am still using Windows 7 Ultimate.
▲The Cooler Master MasterCase Maker 5T chassis is designed as a module and has 4 solid-state drive slots, 2 above the front power supply and 2 at the back. For the convenience of wiring, I chose to install the Kingston A400 solid state drive on the back of the chassis. Compared with mechanical hard drives, solid-state drives are not only faster, they actually save more chassis space, have more flexible installation locations, and are free from the noise of mechanical hard drives.
▲After the new hard drive is installed, you can see in the disk manager that due to different conversion units, the actual capacity of the hard drive is 223.57GB. Use the New Simple Volume Wizard to set up and format the hard drive. In fact, this process also aligns the hard drive to 4K by default.
▲ Through the CrystalDiskInfo software, you can see the hard disk’s firmware, serial number, transmission mode, health status, power-on times, power-on time and other information. This is also an identification of the authenticity, newness and oldness of the solid state.
theoretical test | Kingston A400 solid state drive
1, AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD Benchmark is an SSD solid state drive transmission speed test tool. This software can measure the continuous reading and writing performance of a solid-state drive. You can evaluate the transfer speed of this solid-state drive by simply using this software to test it.
▲Because mechanical hard drives are not suitable for AS SSD Benchmark testing and run very, very slowly, I compared the Kingston A400 (240G) with the Plextor M5S (128G) I bought in 2013. The continuous reading and writing of Kingston A400 (240G) is 453MB/s and 411MB/s, and the continuous reading and writing of Plextor M5S (128G) is 476MB/s and 186MB/s. The two are about the same for continuous reading of data. Plextor M5S is slightly higher at 20MB/s. However, there is a huge gap for continuous writing. Kingston A400 (240G) is more than 2 times higher. In terms of 4K and other aspects, Kingston A400 (240G) is also much higher. In the final score of the software, the Kingston A400 (240G) is also 170 points higher. This is my WIN7 system. If I switch to WIN10, the score of the Kingston A400 (240G) will be higher. I have seen many netizens’ scores exceeding 1,000.
2, CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is a computer hard disk testing tool. The simple and easy-to-operate interface can test storage devices at any time. You can choose the size and test number of the storage device, and you can also test the readable and writable speeds.
▲Similarly, because mechanical hard drives are not suitable for testing, Kingston A400 (240G) and Plextor M5S (128G) are also compared. In terms of continuous reading and writing, Seq, 512K, 4K, and 4KQD32 are almost the same in reading, but there is a big gap in writing. Seq and 512K are about twice as bad.
3, TxBENCH
TxBENCH is mainly used as a speed detection tool for SSD solid state drives. Generally speaking, SSD hard drives are much faster than ordinary hard drives. You can use TxBENCH to test a newly purchased hard drive.The software has various functions such as basic testing, customized testing, and block size adjustment.
▲ Comparing Kingston A400 (240G) and Western Digital 1T blue disk, in terms of reading and writing, Sequential Max (128KB) QD32, A400 is nearly three times higher than Western Digital 1T, while Random Max (128KB) QD1, Random 4KB QD1, Random 4KB QD32 test results, A400 is dozens or hundreds of times higher than Western Digital 1T.
4, ATTO Disk Benchmark
ATTO Disk Benchmark is a simple and easy-to-use disk transfer rate detection software that can be used to detect the reading and writing speed of hard disks, U disks, memory cards and other removable disks. The software uses data test packets of different sizes. Data packets are read and written from 0.5K, 1.0K, 2.0K until 8192.0KB. After the test is completed, the data is expressed in the form of a histogram. It can well illustrate the impact of different file size ratios on disk reading and writing speeds.
▲Comparing Kingston A400 (240G) with Western Digital 1T blue disk, the transfer size ranges from 0.5KB to 8192KB, starting from 256KB, the speed of A400 is about three times that of Western Digital 1T, and the performance gap is still very obvious.
5, Anvils Storage Utilities
Anvil's Storage Utilities is a software specially designed for SSD testing, which can provide a summary score function similar to AS SSD Benchmark test results. The performance display can be divided into two types, one is in MB/second format and the other is in IOPS format. The software interface is novel, the measured data and scores are intuitive, and you can also select the test file size and test disk. The lower right corner displays hard drive information such as brand, capacity, and firmware version, and you can also directly take screenshots of test results.
▲ Compare Kingston A400 (240G) and Western Digital 1T blue disk, Seq 4MB, 4K, 4KQD4, 4KQD16, 32K, 128K, a total of 6 read tests, Seq 4MB, 4K, 4KQD4, 4KQD16, a total of 4 write tests . Seq 4M read and write data, BA400 is 3-4 times higher than Western Digital 1T, and other projects are dozens or hundreds of times higher. In the final score, Kingston A400 (240G) scored 3217 and Western Digital 1T blue disk scored 317. The former is 10 times that of the latter, and the gap is very large.
6, PCMark7
PCMark 7 is a comprehensive PC benchmarking solution for Windows 7 and Windows 8. It contains 7 tests and more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computing, image and video processing, web browsing, gaming, and more. Designed specifically for the entire range of PC hardware, from netbooks and tablets to laptops and desktops, PCMark 7 provides a comprehensive performance test for homes and businesses.
▲ Compare Kingston A400 (240G) and Western Digital 1T blue disk, and only test the system storage (System storage) project. Among the 7 tests of System storage, the first, second and seventh tests of video editing, Windows Media Center, and adding music, the A400 is not much higher. In the third, fourth, and fifth tests of Windows Defender, importing photos, and games, the A400 is three times as powerful as the WD 1T. In the sixth application startup test, the A400 was more than 10 times higher.
actual experience | Kingston A400 solid state drive
software test gap is very big, so what is the actual situation? The following is based on boot time, continuous reading of a single large file, continuous reading of multiple files, "Watch Dogs", "Battlefield 4" 》A total of 5 test items for real experience.
1, boot time
▲ Through actual testing, after installing the system, drivers, software, games and other programs, the boot time of Kingston A400 solid state is about 12 seconds, while the original mechanical hard drive boot time of my office computer is about 47 seconds. Kingston A400 solid state is more than 30 seconds faster than mechanical hard drive. With a solid-state computer, you never have to worry about restarting, so you just have time to breathe. When you usually update software programs and system patches, you no longer have to worry about waiting for too long to restart.
2, single large file continuous reading test
▲The single large file selected is the "Dream Partner" movie, with a size of about 4GB.Copy the movie to the D drive of Kingston A400 SSD and the E drive of Western Digital 1T, and then use FastCopy to transfer the movie from the two drives to another Plextor M5S SSD for testing. The Kingston A400 took 21.9 seconds, with a transfer speed of approximately 204MB/s, and the Western Digital 1T took 28.8 seconds, with a transfer speed of approximately 155MB/s. The time is about 7 seconds shorter and the speed is about 50MB/s faster.
3, multiple large files continuous reading test
▲The multiple large files selected are the "Watch Dogs" game, with a size of about 18GB. Copy the game folder to the D drive of Kingston A400 solid state and the E drive of Western Digital 1T, and then use FastCopy to transfer the game from the two drives to another Plextor M5S solid state drive for testing. The Kingston A400 took 1 minute and 34 seconds, with a transfer speed of about 195MB/s, and the Western Digital 1T took 2 minutes and 06 seconds, with a transfer speed of about 146MB/s. The time is about 32 seconds shorter and the speed is about 50MB/s faster.
4, "Watch Dogs" game startup time test
▲ Game startup loading test, starting from clicking the "Watch Dogs" icon to start the stopwatch until the game is completely entered. The Kingston A400 took 35 seconds, and the Western Digital 1T took about 45 seconds, which was 10 seconds shorter.
5, "Battlefield 4" game startup time test
▲ Game startup loading test, starting from clicking the "Battlefield 4" icon to start the stopwatch until the game is fully entered. The Kingston A400 took about 54 seconds, while the Western Digital 1T took about 1 minute and 36 seconds, which is 42 seconds shorter. The gap is still big, and the solid-state improvement of game loading time is still obvious.
Summary | Kingston A400 Solid State Drive
▲Kingston A400 (240G) solid state drive currently sells for 599 yuan, which is not bad at a time when storage product prices are generally on the high side. If this was last year, it is estimated that the price would be less than 500 yuan. Compared with mechanical hard drives, Kingston A400 (240G) is smaller, lighter, and noisy. I have experienced mechanical hard drive resonance in some average-quality chassis, and the noise was more uncomfortable than fan noise. Later, I installed it on a silent bracket and it improved, so solid-state drives are more worry-free. The solid-state main control chip is Phison PS3111-S11, model CP33238B. After optimization, its continuous read and write speed is greatly improved compared to mechanical hard drives and old solid-state drives, especially the continuous write speed has more than doubled. The flash memory particles are 15nm TLC NAND from Toshiba. TLC particles were criticized by netizens when Samsung launched its first TLC solid state. After nearly a year, everyone discovered that solid-state drives using TLC particles are not as vulnerable as everyone thought, so now there are a large number of TLC solid-state drives with affordable prices and good performance on the market. Finally, let’s summarize the advantages and disadvantages of Kingston A400 (240G) solid state drive. Advantages of
:
1. Compared with mechanical hard drives, it is small in size, light in weight, and has flexible installation location.
2. Compared with mechanical hard drives, it is faster and has significantly improved file transfer and program loading.
3. Compared with mechanical hard drives, it has no noise and no resonance.
4, priced at 599 yuan, is moderately priced among similar solid-state products.
5, Kingston, a long-established storage brand with guaranteed after-sales service.
Disadvantages:
1. Compared with mechanical hard drives, the capacity is small and the price is high. Affected by the storage particle market, the price fluctuates greatly.
2. Because it uses TLC particles, it has a long service life and will it slow down? I hope the manufacturer can completely dispel users’ concerns. Just like the transition from SLC to MLC, users can accept it with peace of mind.
3. Compared to Intel’s five-year warranty, I hope Kingston will be on par with Intel.
