CES 2017: Kingston A400 SSD Becomes The New Entry-Level SATA Drive

Kingston recently released the A400 solid-state drive (SSD) and is showing it off at CES 2017 this week. The Kingston A400 SATA III 2.5-inch SSD is powered by the Phison S11 controller and is paired with Toshiba 2D Planar 15nm TLC NAND Flash. The Kingston A400 SSD series is available in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities with pricing at $49.99, $79.99 and 139.99, respectively. When it comes to performance the A400 drives are rated at up to 500MB/s for sequential read and up to 450MB/s for sequential write, making it roughly 10x faster than a traditional hard drive for an overall faster system that is also more reliable. When it comes to reliability, the A400 series is rated at 1 million hours MTBF and an Total Bytes Written (TBW) endurance rating of 40 TB per ever 120GB of storage capacity.

The Kingston A400 SSD is available as a bare drive only, likely to keep costs down, and is only available in select countries. Right now it has been launched in the following regions Brazil, Russia, China and the Unites States. Kingston let us know that they eventually plan on moving from Toshiba 2D Planar 15nm TLC NAND Flash to 3D NAND Flash down the road for this series. Kingston also will change to a Marvell controller down the road, so this will be the entry-level product that has different components. Despite the NAND and controller change they still plan on meeting the original performance specifications listed below.

Kingston A400 SSD Series Performance, Endurance & Pricing: