Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Basically, this drive works for 90% of people. But for 10%, it has some huge issues. Before I go into the technical details, let me preface it with a simple statement: no other SSD has this unique set of compatibility issues. None. I've never seen a firmware reject various system configs in such a way since SSD's went mainstream with the Intel X25-M in 2009. So as you might guess, this drive has firmware issues. To Kingstons' credit, they have attempted (numerous times) to correct it. I can tell there have been at least 4 revisions. Note: the drives I received from Amazon in November 2019 have the latest firmware. The issue for Kingston is they inherently shot themselves in the foot trying to support this drive. Kingston has been notorious, most famously with the A300, for changing components in drives without relabeling them. Everything from NAND brands and type to complete controllers. The A400 suffers the same issue, so they are dealing with a compounded situation of firmware bugs across a variety of specifications. Which is why they can't completely fix it for ALL drives, because the fixes don't apply to ALL drives. Now that alone has scared people off the brand, and it should scare you away too. Who would buy a product with said specifications when they are likely to receive something entirely different? Well, that's the Kingston way, and it is in plain sight because in Kingston fashion: they NEVER list specifications for their products other than performance. Kingston never reveals the controller, cache package, NAND brand or type, or overall reference design. Because they are well aware they plan to change it based on what is available to them for their packaging budget. Now that I'm done rightfully thrashing Kingstons' business ethics, onto the drive. I ordered 6 of these: (2) 480GB and (4) 240GB. I can say the 480GB is less problematic. But one was problematic and two 240GB drives were unusable. On the other hand, two 240GB drives installed perfectly and run fine to this day. The problem machines: Dell Vostro 260 Pentium G630 (H61 chipset seems to bring out a SATA LPC bug) and any AMD chipset seems to have a SATA bug as well, as reported in various forums around the web. So basically avoid putting these drives in older machines that are NOT SATA3 (6Gbps) or any AMD PC. Well, that eliminates the majority of the target audience for an entry level drive. Verified working PC's: HP Elitebook 840 G1 (laptop H81 variant) and Dell Inspiron 15 5000 (recent Intel 8th Gen Pentium - probably 370 series chipset variant) Behavior: <HDD transfer rates reading\writing - doesn't matter if SLC flushes, transfer rates are still horrible. The malfunctional SATA link causes the system to stall randomly, for 10-60 seconds at a time while the drive attempts to flush a stalled queue. You know its a SATA link error because the HDD light blinks or even goes near solid. If the SLC were dumping, garbage collection were occurring of the controller were bogged down, you WOULD NOT see SATA activity for this. This drive should be pulled from the market. UPDATE 9/26/2020 A 240GB drive failed today less than a year into service in a very light-use office PC. Lenovo T30 circa 2010 Workstation with a X58 chipset. Probably retiring the PC, due to overall age, but the drive got us to that point, not the other components which still serve the roll as a basic office PC in a warehouse handling shipping labels and timeclock software. Should never have gambled with these drives. Fortunately the machine was entirely backed up to the cloud using Backblaze.