No more excuses. If you’ve been waiting for prices to drop before upgrading to the luxurious SSD life, now’s the time. Amazon is selling a 120GB Kingston A400 SSD for just $28. Yes, you read that correctly—$28 for an SSD. This particular model usually costs over $40.
Don’t expect such a humble drive to crack our list of the best SSDs, but make no mistake: The performance of even the pokiest solid-state drives leaves the fastest mechanical in the dust. Upgrading to an SSD will supercharge your startup time. Games and applications will load much quicker. Your entire computing experience will feel all-around snappier. It’s the single best upgrade you can make to improve the performance of a laptop or desktop.
Since this model sticks to the traditional 2.5-inch SATA design rather than the more exotic M.2 form factor, it should have no problem slipping right into most PCs. Here’s a guide on how to add an SSD to your laptop.
The Kingston A400’s miniscule 120GB capacity won’t hold much, but it’s more than enough to function as a boot drive. Load it with Windows and your most critical software, then dump all the rest of your data—documents, videos, images, games, et cetera—onto a more spacious secondary drive and you’ll still enjoy the vast majority of speed benefits a solid-state drive brings. Our guide to moving your data from a hard drive to an SSD can help. Alternatively, the Kingston A400 is also available in 240GB for $55, 480GB for $91.60, or 960GB for $238.29 if you don’t mind springing extra for more space.
We haven’t reviewed this affordable Kingston drive, but those prices are significantly below what you’d pay even for the Crucial BX300, our pick for the best budget SSD. A 120GB Crucial drive currently costs $60 on the street. Again: $28 for the 120GB Kingston A400 SSD is a steal.