Kingston A2000 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD

I bought this M.2 1TB 2280 Kingston drive to replace a smaller standard M.2 SATA3 drive. The Kingston is much faster than that previous drive. My motherboard, an MSI B450-A-Pro full ATX has one M.2 slot mounted fairly centrally. It's easy to get to. So fittting it was a simple process. My board will run either the standard SATA3 M.2 or this Kingston NVME M.2. Not all boards will do that so be careful to order the correct M.2 drive for the socket on your computer motherboard.With only one M.2 drive socket on my motherboard I also needed to buy an NVME M.2 external drive enclosure so I could mount my new drive in it and then clone my old M.2 drive to it. The enclosures are very cheap to buy if you search a bit and I found a good NVME for just £23 online. The NVME ... MoreI bought this M.2 1TB 2280 Kingston drive to replace a smaller standard M.2 SATA3 drive. The Kingston is much faster than that previous drive. My motherboard, an MSI B450-A-Pro full ATX has one M.2 slot mounted fairly centrally. It's easy to get to. So fittting it was a simple process. My board will run either the standard SATA3 M.2 or this Kingston NVME M.2. Not all boards will do that so be careful to order the correct M.2 drive for the socket on your computer motherboard.With only one M.2 drive socket on my motherboard I also needed to buy an NVME M.2 external drive enclosure so I could mount my new drive in it and then clone my old M.2 drive to it. The enclosures are very cheap to buy if you search a bit and I found a good NVME for just £23 online. The NVME enclosures tend to be more expensive though than the standard M.2 SATA enclosures which you can buy for around £15. Again be careful to order the correct socket type so you can fit your new drive in it. There's lots of online help to make sure you understand this if you are not sure.I used Acronis True Image free software to clone my drive on to the other. Switched off and fitted the new drive. Takes just minutes to do. Booted first time. And as I said earlier in this review, the Kingston is very fast on most systems. It attains read and write speeds sequential or otherwise at many many times faster than a mechanical drive and faster than the standard M.2 SATA that I previous had fitted.With memory prices as they are now (much lower than 18mths ago) this was a steal from CCL computers who again gave very good service with very prompt delivery.

An amazing budget SSD

Took a whole week to be delivered. The SSD is cheap, fast yet still reliable, the speed is as advertised. M.2 screw is not included in the package so you better prepare one if your motherboard doesn't have it as well. Kingston also includes Acronics True Image key inside the package, which is nice for backing up things. Overall, I'm satisfied with the product.

Best Option for People on a Budget

- Kingston is an electronics company that has been around for a while (1990s).- Its not the fastest M.2 but the difference between most M.2's speeds are within seconds timing, so it doesn't matter.- it comes with AES 256bit data encryption(**doesn't protect against ransomware**)- Significant increase in computer performance, Startup time on my system is within seconds. That's good enough for me (**it all depends on how your system is configured**).- Comes with its own cloning software (comes on a stick-of-gum sized cardboard in the package**).

Compact (Secondary) Next Gen Storage

Smaller than a credit card and looking quite fragile. But, once I got the back panel off my ASUS TUF A15 Ryzen7 4800H, it was a breeze to undo 1 small screw & slide it in. ( Thank you Youtube ) No issues restarting the Laptop, formatting the drive was no problem & BAM, there it was ready to go. 1st crucial test was moving some 130Gb of game files to the NVme & wow ! data moving @ 1.3 Gb/s in next to no time at all. Later the speed dropped off to 447 Mb/s with moving over of other programs, but I remain impressed. What more can I say. Worth the investment !! PS. I've never done such a big review before.

Great hard drives.

I am very happy with this hard drive so far. I bought two of them to run two pc operating systems. Boot times are almost nil. Kingston hard drive also come with cloning software which made installation easy. I also have the A1000 as my game drive: game load times are fast, reliable.

Massive upgrade from SATA drives

Blistering speeds. I can boot to Windows 10 in less than 5 seconds paired with an i5-9400f and 8 GB of Ballistix 2400 Mhz memory. EVERYTHING is faster. It's paired with a WD 1 TB Blue for backing up files, so I'm not hurting for space, but be mindful that the 250 GB of storage may need a little file management to keep from filling up.

Nice budget NVMe, bought during sale

In the upper end of budget NVMe pci-e storage options; a TLC drive with comparable performance to the Adata XPG SX6000 Pro, which will be well over fine for the average user.Rated 4 stars due to being able to find this for 50 bucks at the time of purchase. If bought closer to its initial MSRP, I'd rate this 3 stars and suggest finding better performing alternatives closer to that price range, such as the SK Hynix Gold P31 or a Sabrent Rocket.

Review of FBML

Good Points: Speeds as advised & incredible random performance, which is important for ultra-fast game and program loading times and snappy experience, even when the drive is half full!TLC and not QLC - So you get the good stuff and not bad performing SSD like 660p.Comes with Acronis key to clone your drive to the new NVMe drive.No slow down or excessive heating after copying/writing large files (50GB+).On par with Samsung 970 Evo in some test's and for gaming/workload use at half the price!SMI SM2263 controller, DRAM, 96 Layers Micron 3D NAND TLCMay have the possibility to be OC'd to Pilot-E levels of speedsUsed in Asrock B450M Steel Legend AMD Ryzen build, and works perfectly.Improvement Points: The packaging is a bit on the cheap side, would ... MoreGood Points: Speeds as advised & incredible random performance, which is important for ultra-fast game and program loading times and snappy experience, even when the drive is half full!TLC and not QLC - So you get the good stuff and not bad performing SSD like 660p.Comes with Acronis key to clone your drive to the new NVMe drive.No slow down or excessive heating after copying/writing large files (50GB+).On par with Samsung 970 Evo in some test's and for gaming/workload use at half the price!SMI SM2263 controller, DRAM, 96 Layers Micron 3D NAND TLCMay have the possibility to be OC'd to Pilot-E levels of speedsUsed in Asrock B450M Steel Legend AMD Ryzen build, and works perfectly.Improvement Points: The packaging is a bit on the cheap side, would prefer they used a small box instead.I think the controller and the 3D NAND can do better speeds, seems like it is underclocked/limited, probably could do 3GB/s with a heatsink if someone knew what they were doing.

Solid State M.2 drive.

These M.2 drives are wonderful. Very fast. If you're mixing with another M.2, check to make sure they're compatible. Turns out the one that I had isn't compatible with this part. So I removed the old drive. This part is a lot larger and it's faster. I have it as a disk for video cameras. Love it.

performs as expected

its really a great drive, excellent speed/money ratio. ive been a long-time fan of Kingstons lineup, and this product is thier cream on the cake.remember ppl : Flash memory should not be cooled, run them at ambient temps. if you are going to use a heat spreader, insulate the flash chips with some cardboard, and only allow thermal pad contact with the controller chip (thats the metallic chip on this drive)