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Kingston A1000 M.2 SSD Review: Better performance is not always pocket-friendly
Kingston A1000 M.2 SSD offers more than 2x performance than a SATA SSD
The A1000 series is the first set of M.2 SSD from Kingston, which has pioneered in manufacturing RAM and storage peripherals. The M.2 SSD is the latest standard in the computer storage industry, which has been widely used in PC and laptops lately. Should you upgrade your mechanical hard disc to the Kingston A1000 M.2 SSD? Let's find out.
- Compact
- 5 years warrenty
- High data transfer speeds
- Expensive
- Fragile
Specifications
Size: 22mm x 88mm
Interface: Gen 3.0 x2 interface
Controller: 4-channel Phison 5008 controller
Storage type: 3D Nand Flash
Warranty: 5 years
Design and form factor
Unlike a SATA SSD or a mechanical hard drive, the Kingston A1000 M.2 SSD looks like a RAM stick and it has a compact form factor. There are several advantages to the Kingston A1000 like, it directly plugs into the motherboard, which reduces the requirement of any sort of cable for data and power transfer. This interface also offers faster data speed compared to the primitive storage solutions. In fact, the M.2 SSD consumes less power compared to a mechanical hard disc and a SATA SSD.
The major disadvantage of the M.2 SSD is again related to the form factor. As it is so tiny, one can accidentally break and there is no way to repair or recover data if the SSD is physically damaged. Unlike a mechanical hard disc, the chance of failure on the M.2 SSD is very slim as there are no moving parts involved.
Price comparison
n terms of pricing, the Kingston A1000 SSD is priced at Rs 12,000 for the 240 GB variant and a standard 2.5-inch SATA SSD with 240 GB capacity will retail for a price of Rs 5000 (depending on the brand) and a user can buy a 1 TB mechanical hard disc with 7200 RPM for a starting price of Rs. 3000.
Clearly, when it comes to pricing, the Kingston A1000 does not impress us at all. However, do note that the pricing difference between the M.2 SSD and the SATA SSD is almost double. If you are building a PC for gaming or editing videos or even for a high-end graphics design, then going with an M.2 SSD will definitely help to ease the task.
Performance
As one can clearly see, the Kingston A1000 SSD is a light year ahead in terms of writing and reading speeds compared to a mechanical and a SATA based SSD.
In terms of reading speeds, the Kingston A1000 SSD records a maximum of 1588 MB/s, whereas the SATA SSD has a read speed of 382 MB/s and the mechanical hard disc records a maximum writing speed of 181 MB/s. The demographics of the graph read-speed shows the dominance of the Kingston A1000 M.2 SSD and the read-speeds also reflect the same.
Real world scenario
We installed Windows 10 on the Kingston A1000 SSD, WD Green SATA SSD, and the Seagate 1 TB mechanical hard disc and we tested out the boot speed on all these drives. Even in this scenario, the Kingston A1000 SSD is the first one to turn on from a cold boot, preceded by the SATA SSD and the mechanical hard drive came last.
Boot test
When we selected the Kingston A1000, the device took 19 seconds to boot up and the SATA SSD took 28 seconds and the mechanical hard disc came last, which took 33 seconds to turn on.
File copy test
Copying a 12.4 GB folder (which was an installation package with different sub files) took 49 seconds on the Kingston A1000 SSD, 1 minute and 29 seconds on the SATA SSD and a whopping 3 minutes and 19 seconds on the mechanical hard disc.
NOTE: these files were duplicated from the same storage source.
Do note that, these speeds also depend on the system configuration. Over system is powered by the 7th Gen Kaby Lake Intel Core i7-7700 Quad-Core chipset with a base frequency of 3.6 GHz paired with 16 GB of high-speed LPDDR4 HyperX Fury RAM.
We got similar results in the games opening time as well, where the M.2 SSD took the least amount of time to load a game compared to the other options. However, once the game loads up, you will not notice any difference on any of these storage solutions.
Vertict
Overall, we were impressed with the performance offered by the Kingston A1000 M.2 SSD. However, we felt that the SSD was priced a bit higher than the competition. It offers great speeds, makes your PC a bit faster and there are no moving parts involved, which means that the SSD could last longer than a typical mechanical hard disc.
However, when it comes to pricing, Rs 12,000 for a 240 GB of storage solution is not easy to digest, as companies like Samsung offers the same technology at half of the price tag. Also, make sure that your PC or laptop has an M.2 SSD slot before making the purchase.
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