Kingston is celebrating a milestone for its venerable A400 SSD: the SATA-based 2.5-inch SSD has officially hit the 100 million mark for total number of units shipped, 9 years after its introduction back in 2017, at a time when SSDs began to enter mainstream PC market.
100 Million Units Of Kingston A400
By today’s standards, the Kingston A400’s rated performance of 500MB/s read and 450MB/s write is nothing special; most budget NVMe SSDs can provide 10x over that in terms of sequential performance these days. However, SSD is very much still a niche in 2017, and there’s a good number of users at the time still relying on hard disk drives (HDDs) for large data storage, with slow access speeds that often became the single biggest bottleneck in terms of loading speeds and general responsiveness.
While having five times the sequential read/write speeds over contemporary HDDs was certainly impressive at the time, the true game changer is how SSD fundamentally works. In HDDs, data is physically located in a specific spot on the magnetic disks, which takes time for the drive to seek and read the data. While that was sufficient in the 2000s, it’s already struggling to handle large game files in the late 2010s. SSDs have no such problems as access speed is functionally instantaneous, which contributed to a massive reduction in loading times.
Kingston A400 remained an affordable option for a great amount of users to replace their HDDs for a big performance upgrade (it was also an easy and cost-effective drop-in upgrade for those using non-NVMe motherboards at the time), and that is likely the reason behind its commercial success today. You can still get one of these on retailers today, though the company and the market at large has a lot more M.2-based options that performs even better than this 2.5 inches of technological wonder.
Pokdepinion: This unassuming SSD has certainly contributed to a lot of happy gamers in the past 9 years.