Kingston UV400 SSD comes in different storage size and tested the 480GB storage variant. In this article, we are going to take the deeper look on this modern SSD drive from Kingston. It is the cost effective drive available for around Rs. 9,999. It claims to be more reliable that a hard drive and 10 times faster than 7200RPM hard drive.
Kingston is the key player in the storage solutions and this product is also a good addition in the existing portfolio.
This drive comes in a blister pack that has card portion serving as the manual. It is very similar to what Kingston used to ship its pen drives. Well, this could be an attempt to keep the price low. The package lists the price and warranty information. It offers 3 years of warranty.
Kingston SSDNow UV400 Series Specifications
I am adding the specifications of the model I am using
- Capacity: 480GB
- Controller: Marvel 88SS1074
- Data Transfer up to 550MB/s Read and 500 MB/s Write
- Power Consumption: 0.672W Idle / 0.693W Avg / 0.59W (MAX) Read / 2.515W (MAX) Write
- Storage temperature: -40°C~85°C
- Operating temperature: 0°C~70°C
- Dimensions: 100.0mm x 69.9mm x 7.0mm
- Weight: 57g
- Vibration operating: 2.17G Peak (7–800Hz)
- Vibration non-operating: 20G Peak (10–2000Hz)
- Life expectancy: 1 million hours MTBF
- Warranty/support: Limited 3-year warranty with free technical support
Kingston SSDNow UV400 is your typical 2.5-inch solid state drive with 7mm thickness. It is light in weight and cheaper in price. It has silver metal housing and black Kingston head logo on the top side.
At an end, it has SATA power and data connections. It drive is powered by the Marvell 88SS1074 SSD four-channel controller and has Toshiba 15nm 2D planar Triple-Level Cell (TLC) NAND. It has Nanya 512MB LPDDR3 DRAM cache chip.
Benchmarking results
These are benchmarking scores recorded on few disk benchmarking tools.
Here see how speed dropped to around 100 Mbps.
This is because it is the typical TLC-based SSD. You will see this lower data transfer speed if you copy a large amount of data to the drive without any idle time. Once the device is idle, it clears the cache to offer you better speed again.
Final words
You could get better SSD for this capacity, but this is a solid value for money product and affordable. It also worth to note that performance of the other UV400 SSDs decreases if you go with low-storage models of the same product. You will not get good performance numbers but this is not bad considering the price of the product.
The only disadvantage of the drive is that it relies on the SLC cache and this issue is with all TLC-based SSDs. So, write speed drops dramatically once the cache fills up. This only appears if you are doing longer writes that are the transfer of 6-8 GB file.
This drive is backed by 3-year warranty and we know that Kingston is good in after sale support.
Overall I am satisfied with this Solid State Drive and recommend you if you do not want to spend more.
