Will Judd
While we spend a lot of our time over here in the deals corner of RPS covering high-speed NVMe SSDs, I also try to keep an eye out for good deals on classic 2.5-inch SATA SSDs as well. These drives are physically larger, slower and not much better value than NVMe M.2 alternatives, but occasionally prices become so low that you have to take notice.
Today’s example is this 480GB Kingston A400 SSD, which has been reduced to under £25 versus an original RRP of £63. That’s an astonishing amount of space for the money, and well worth picking up if you have an old machine still running on a HDD.
I actually upgraded my brother’s old laptop with this exact drive last year, and it went surprisingly smoothly. Actually taking the laptop apart to get at the original hard drive was the hard part, requiring a small screwdriver and some careful study of a YouTube tutorial.After this, if I wanted to start fresh I could have just installed the new drive, made a USB stick and reinstalled Windows, but you also have the option of cloning the drive using the supplied Acronis software.
For me, this meant hooking both drives up to my desktop PC, cloning them, then installing the SSD in the laptop… but if the machine you’re upgrading has two SATA SSD bays, then you can simply plug in the new drive alongside the old one, clone, then format the old drive to use as additional storage. If you do opt to clone and replace, then you get the added benefit of having a mechanical backup of your new SSD to put in a dusty corner of your room and presumably forget about.
In any case, moving from a mechanical drive to an SSD made the laptop faster to start up and significantly 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 do consider performing a similar upgrade yourself if you still have a machine with a mechanical disk in your life!