Kingston A1000 NVMe M.2 480GB SSD Review

Conclusion

We think that Kingston deserve an awful lot of credit for what they have done with the A1000.

Don’t misunderstand. We don’t mean a lot of credit for having a go. Or credit in a patronising way. So often manufacturers – not just of PC hardware but of almost anything – adhere to the “bigger, better, faster, more” maxim. Everything has to be faster than what came before. Everything must dazzle you with new features, regardless of their utility. Everything must be a new flagship and maybe in the future the price will trickle down to the level of the masses.

Kingston, instead, have taken a different approach. They have followed the Colin Chapman philosophy of less is more. Rather than target a tiny fraction of the market, the 1%, and gain headlines with staggering speeds, they have designed the A1000 to be affordable to all. It barely costs more than a good SSD, yet as we saw throughout our testing it pumps out figures that will entice even the most miserly of upgraders. If you’ve sat looking at a mid-size SSD and comparing its cost to your available funds, then the A1000 should force a rethink.

Our review sample hits the price/performance/capacity sweet spot. 480GB is more than enough for Windows, various Adobe applications, a few games and the like, the standard things that most of us run. Okay with the way that games are going into the stratospheric install footprints you can’t install your entire Steam library, but then that’s true of most drives. On the flip side what you do get when compared to a similar capacity SSD is much faster transfer speeds. We regularly saw over 1000 MB/s and sometimes 1500 MB/s or more. At worst you’re doubling what you’d expect and at best maybe tripling it, and all for a reasonably low entry fee. 

If you’re in the market for a new drive then remember how transformative your first SSD was in comparison to the old mechanical offerings, and know that an M.2 is a similar leap forwards. Now, thanks to Kingston and the A1000 NVMe M.2, it doesn’t require stretching your budget beyond that of a standard SSD. It’s almost free extra performance. That’s something we can all get on board with.

  

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