If you’ve been looking for a relatively affordable way to increase your PC or laptop’s performance, you might want to take a look at swapping your old rig’s aging hard disk drive to a newer, solid-state drive. Swapping to an SSD drive gives you more than 5 to 20 times faster loading times compared to a traditional HDD, and does wonders for older laptops that still rely on HDDs are their primary storage method. That’s where the Kingston A2000 M.2 NVMe SSD comes in.
The company’s new SSD drive promises decent access speeds as well as increased reliability, all at a price point that won’t sting your wallet. With a sticker price of Php 4,790 for the 500GB variant, the Kingston A2000 SSD is a great option for people looking to upgrade to an NVMe SSD solution.
No frills NVMe
Kingston’s packaging and presentation for the A2000 are as no-frills as you can get short of the product getting delivered to you in a paper bag. The drive ships in a blister pack with the documentation included.
Just like its contemporaries, the Kingston A2000 is a 2280 (22mm wide and 80mm long) M.2 NVMe solution that has an SMI SM2263ENG 4-channel controller with Micron’s latest 96-layer NAND.
What’s more is that the drive also features built-in hardware encryption, as well as a 5-year warranty and Acronis migration integration.
Not the fastest but still quick enough for most applications
Kingston advertises the A2000’s read/write performance at 2,200 MB/s and 2,000 MB/s respectively, numbers that are pretty decent considering what the drive’s made for.
Our tests with the drive confirm those numbers, which isn’t always the case with manufacturer-provided performance metrics.
Compared to gaming-focused drives like the Western Digital Black or the Seagate FireCude 510 the A2000’s performance looks mediocre in comparison, but again you have to take the price of the SSDs mentioned into consideration.
All tests were done in a similar test bench, namely on an ASUS ROG Maximus X Formula board with 9th generation Intel Core i5 9400F processor with 32GB of DDR4 RAM.
Verdict: Practical choice for an SSD upgrade
If you’ve been looking for a value-packed NVMe SSD drive to upgrade your aging laptop or PC with, then it’s hard to beat the value that Kington’s A2000 M.2 NVMe SSD brings to the table.
It’s not the fastest drive that we’ve tested, but it’s plenty fast enough, and thanks to the 350 TBW endurance promised by Kingston, it’s one of the more reliable drives out there.
