rockpapershotgun.com
Will Judd
While we spend a lot of time here in the corner of RPS deals covering high-speed NVMe SSDs, I’m also trying to keep an eye out for deals on mainstream 2.5-inch SATA SSDs. These drives are physically larger, slower, and don’t offer much better value than the NVMe M.2 alternatives, but sometimes the prices get so low you have to take that into account.
Today’s example is this 480GB Kingston A400 SSD, which has been discounted to under £25 from an original RRP of £63. That’s an amazing amount of space for the money, and well worth picking up if you have an old machine that’s still running on a hard drive.
In fact, I upgraded my brother’s old laptop to this exact drive last year, and it went surprisingly well. In fact, disassembling the laptop to access the original hard drive was the hardest part, requiring a small screwdriver and in-depth study of a YouTube tutorial. After that, if I wanted to start fresh, I could have just installed the new drive, done a USB drive and reinstalled Windows, but you also have the option of cloning the drive using the bundled Acronis software.
For me, that meant connecting both drives to my desktop, cloning them, then installing the SSD in the laptop…but if the machine you’re upgrading has two SATA SSD bays, you can just plug in the new one disk next to the old one, clone, then format the old disk to use as additional storage. If you choose to clone and replace, you get the added benefit of having a mechanical backup of your new SSD to put in a dusty corner of your room and probably forget about.
Either way, switching from a mechanical drive to an SSD made the laptop boot up faster and noticeably more responsive, which I was very happy about. It’s hard to go back to using a mechanical drive in the age of SSDs, so consider doing a similar upgrade yourself if you still have a machine with a mechanical drive in your life!
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