Kingston Technology is an underrated American tech manufacturer that's responsible for the HyperX line of accessories, along with its own branded internal components. If you build computers, you already know Kingston, because its DRAM, SSDs, memory cards, USB cards, microSD cards, and more always come up in searches.
The company sent two of its latest products for 2020 to Thought for Your Penny to review. We installed it and ran it for a month to find out what it's capable of. Here's what we found.
Kingston A400 SSD Review
If you're not already aware, SSDs are the fastest, most stable way to store your data. We got a 960GB SSD from Kingston and installed it in the gaming rig. It's a standard 2.5-inch SATA SSD, and it's packaged just like a USB drive or SD card. The drive feels solid, although it came with no mounting hardware, something I'm not used to with hard drives.
The 960GB drive is new to the market, with the 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities previously released. It uses planar TLC flash and has 500MBps read/write speeds with a two-channel controller and 1 million hours mean time between failures.
We installed the drive as a secondary storage drive to the Seagate FireCuda 510 SSD already installed. After verifying they're similarly sized and installed correctly, ee then started copying files onto both drives. While the FireCuda won on every transfer, Kingston's A400 wasn't far behind.
The low price and solid performance were a breath of fresh air and easily outperform any HDDs we had installed from WD. Overall, it's slower than the Samsung, Seagate, and WD SSDs, but it's priced much lower. For blazing fast gaming, there are better options, but they cost more.
I would've preferred having the mountin hardware, but overall, it's a great deal for the money.
Final Grade: C+
Kingston 32GB DataTraveler Vault Privacy 3.0 Review
Kingston also sent in a DataTraveler Vault Privacy 3.0 USB flash drive for review. This 32GB flash drive includes 256-bit AES encryption that's both FIPS 197 certified and TAA compliant. It uses SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and enables enterprise-level IT security.
It's a rugged design that uses FAT32 and is compatible with both Windows and Mac. Previous iterations were knocked by critics for not supporting USB 3.0, which this proudly does.
The built-in encryption works well, and this 0.5-ounce drive is a great way to protect data while traveling. You can even use an Aegis Secure Key to lock the hardware. The downside is you only get 10 incorrect password attempts in a row before the drive formats itself.
As for data transfer, you can expect 100MBps read/write, much faster than its previous iterations, thanks to the super-fast USB 3.0 connect ion. Overallk, this is a solid drive for anyone running a small business or working from home.