While we spend a lot of time here in the corner of RPS deals including high-speed NVMe SSDs, I also try to keep an eye out for good deals on classic 2.5-inch SATA SSDs. These drives are physically larger, slower, and not much better value than the NVMe M.2 alternatives, but sometimes the price gets so low that you have to pay attention.
Today’s example is this 480GB Kingston A400 SSD, which has been reduced to under £25 from an original RRP of £63. That’s an incredible amount of space for the money and well worth buying if you have an old machine that still runs on an HDD.
I actually upgraded my brother’s old laptop with this very drive last year and it went surprisingly smoothly. In fact, disassembling the laptop to get to the original hard drive is the hard part, requiring a small screwdriver and a thorough study of YouTube tutorials. Then, if I wanted to start over, I could simply install the new drive, create a USB, and reinstall Windows, but you also have the option of cloning the drive using the supplied Acronis software.
For me, this means connecting both drives to my desktop, cloning them, then inserting the SSD into the laptop… but what if the machine you’re upgrading has two SSD bays SATA, just plug the new drive in next to the old one, clone, then format the old drive to use as additional storage. If you choose 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 perhaps forget about.
In any case, switching from a mechanical drive to an SSD made the laptop boot up faster and respond significantly faster, which I was very pleased with. It’s hard to go back to mechanical drives in the SSD age, so consider doing the same upgrade yourself if you’re still using a machine with a mechanical disc!
