SATA drives are still going strong as Kingston announces it has shipped 100 million A400 SSDs

I remember when an early review sample of the original Intel X25-M SATA SSD landed on my desk. It was the first mainstream consumer SSD and easily the biggest development in PC storage in the last few decades. That was 2008, but it turns out SATA SSDs are still going strong, as in 100 million strong.

Kingston has just announced that it has shipped fully 100 million units of its A400 SATA SSD since launching the drive. That's a model that went on sale in 2017, but is still available today.

You can get the A400 in 240 GB, 480 GB and 960 GB capacities, with the latter clocking up claimed 500 MB/s read and 450 MB/s write speeds. OK, those numbers are positively pedestrian by modern SSD standards. The very latest PCIe Gen 5 drives are theoretically good for getting on for 25 times that performance in terms of raw bandwidth.

But the key comparison for a SATA SSD like the A400 isn't a cutting-edge M.2 drive. It's one of those antediluvian contraptions with spinning magnetic platters, namely old school hard drives.

As several commenters on this Reddit thread discussing the Kingston milestone point out, SATA drives like the A400 are a "life saver" for older PCs. Indeed, I'm not totally convinced most people would immediately know if their fancy M.2 drive was somehow secretly swapped for the likes of an A400.

The point is that even an old SATA-based mini-brick like the A400 delivers most of the benefits in terms of system response that's associated with the latest solid-state drive technology.

By way of example, take this YouTube overview of game level load times comparing an HDD with a SATA SSD and then PCIe Gen 3, 4 and 5 NVMe SSDs. Using Starfield as the metric, the HDD took 218 seconds to do the initial level load. But the SATA drive cut that to just 19 seconds.

Yes, the NVMe SSDs were faster still. But even the Gen 5 drive only reduced the load time to just under 15 seconds. Not exactly life-changing is it?

Another consideration here is PCIe lane availability. By their nature, PCIe-based SSDs consume PCIe lanes, which can be a limited and precious commodity shared with the likes of a GPU.

So, in some scenarios with lower-spec motherboards, it can be advantageous to avoid populating PCIe lanes, especially with secondary mass storage as opposed to primary OS drives. All of which means that SATA SSDs retain relevance, even here in 2026 where the attention is largely focused on the latest M.2 drives.

Of course, with all SSD pricing on the up of late, the A400 may not feel like much of a bargain right now. But if it makes you feel better, when that Intel X25-M drive came out, it cost over $500 for an 80 GB model. In that context, the thick end of $190 for over 10 times the capacity doesn't feel quite so terrible, even if it is about the same as what you'd pay for a decent Gen 4 M.2 SSD of the same capacity.