480GB Kingston A400 TLC 3D NAND 2.5" SATA III Internal Solid State Drive Expired

Woohoo....bracing for today's installment of the "Kingston drives are trash, just buy Samsung" debates!

Was looking at this or MX500 (more expensive but better performance from what I have read). Can you really tell a difference?

The 960GB drive is also on sale, at $64.99.

If you have a box for VMs this is sort of the perfect price/performance for putting that VM on an SSD...or just attaching a raw device to the VM. It's not a super-fast drive, but it'll saturate your SATA3 connection and it'll have more IOPS than an array.

Nope. But the MX500 has a better warranty and a lesser chance of failing. There is no guarantee though. For daily use, you will likely never notice a difference in performance.

Give it some time. Ssd storage can scale much better than platters once the race kicks off.

Also, there's no need for ssds to be cheaper to be more preferable. Even costing more, the maintenance is reduced and service contracts are cheaper to implement.

Is Kingston's performance and quality similar / better / worse than BX500?

For what purpose would you recommend a SSD with DRAM as opposed to the cheaper ones such as BX500

If you game, then I highly recommend a DRAM drive. Anything that requires a lot of read/writes to your drive should have DRAM. I know many people recommend not using DRAM-less drives as your OS drive, but I think that's not really true. If you're an average user, like someone who checks their email, surfs the web, and writes some word docs here and there, a DRAM less drive will be fine.

I do think Crucial is a more reliable brand, but I'm not sure if I'd say the BX500 is better than this Kingston. Both are DRAM-less budget oriented drives. I'd go with whichever is significantly cheaper. If there's only a difference of a few dollars, then definitely get the Crucial BX500 over this one.

Even a DRAM-less SSD is going to be so much faster than a regular HDD. Whatever anyone says about DRAM-less SSDs being super slow is full of BS because only those who transfer a lot of files, deal with large installations, etc. will face significantly slowdowns vs a DRAM SSD, and even then in most cases the DRAM-less SSD will still be faster than any HDD.

I installed a 512gb NVMe SSD with DRAM on my laptop. It replaced a slower DRAM-less non-NVMe SSD because it was only 128gb. I personally cannot tell the difference in performance whatsoever between the two drives, even though the 128gb drive is technically much slower and inferior than the replacement. I'm sure I'm saving a few seconds to a minute when installing large files and I'm sure benchmark software would show the new drive as being much faster, but in real world, day to day basic use, there is honestly very little to notice.

Looks like the 960GB went up to $72 on Amazon.

For about $15 more, you're in DRAM territory.

DRAM isn't always a must have, but when it's as cheap as lunch, why not spring for it?

Isn't this one of the famous 3 brand (Adata/PNY/Kingston) ever performance bait & Switch in memory chip/controller. Up to in the spec is really handful. Just don't know close to upper or lower.
https://youtu.be/K07sEM6y4Uc