Where to buy? 👉 KingSpec, KingDian, KingFast & XrayDisk at AliExpress
Anyone who browses major Asian sales sites in search of tech products has certainly found some chinese SSD brands such as KingSpec, KingDian, KingFast or XrayDisk. In addition to the name (in many cases), they’re similar in price and specs, which can create the doubt as to whether they’re worth it for everyday use. Can you trust these SSDs?
Recently, I had experiences with models from KingSpec and KingDian, manufacturers with names similar to the brand of my previous SSD, the more famous Kingston. I imported them from AliExpress and, after a few weeks of use, today I’ll talk about the KingDian unit to evaluate this type of product.
The model name is “S280” and mine has 1TB of capacity. It cost about 88 USD and took 31 days to travel from China to Brazil – yes, deliveries are slow here. It came in a simple cardboard package with a hard plastic protection. Time to install it in my 2AM E550 laptop (it’s a Brazilian version of the Clevo NB50TK1).
The drive I’d been using was a Kingston SA400, very common in my country, which served as secondary storage, in addition to a 256GB M.2 unit, where my Windows 10 is installed. After cloning the existing drive inside the new one (I used Paragon Backup & Recovery software) and merge the resulting unpartitioned space to the main one (with Partition Wizard), the KingDian was ready to use and running 100%.
I performed some comparisons between the KingDian S280 and the Kingston SA400. The standard evaluation of the CrystalDiskMark software revealed a slight advantage for the Kingston model in most aspects, as shown in the image below.
Then, I copied a 14.5GB file from an external SSD, via USB 3.0, to both drives. Once again, Kingston won, although with a subtle advantage: 33 seconds versus 37.
In a final real-life assessment, I copied a set of files that totaled 55GB. Leaving aside the technical details, this task puts a lot of stress on basic SSDs, and it’s common for them to lose speed after a period. That’s exactly what happened with the Kingston SA400, which slowed down in the middle of the process and took long 21 minutes and 7 seconds to receive the files. The KingDian S280, despite performing a slightly lower speed at the beginning, remained stable all the time and showed a huge advantage in the end: 2 minutes and 24 seconds. Wow.
This last result was really impressive, showing that the chinese product, if it’s not fantastic, at least behaves well in conventional tasks. Disregarding the mentioned comparisons, the feeling I have is that I kept the same old drive in my laptop, although with twice the capacity. I believe that, for the tasks that I will perform (file storage, Steam games), this is a good enough sign.
I’ve been using the new piece for a few weeks now, so I’m still not able to talk about long-term durability. But taking into account that daily performance has been very good and stable, I believe that I’ll have no problems. So, yes, I believe that chinese SSDs are not a bad idea, at least if they’re cheaper than other models for sale in your country. I’ll buy another one in the near future.
is it dead yet?
Nope. Still up and running.
Is it still performing well after all this time??
Yes, it is!