Silicon Power SSD 256GB 3D NAND A55 SLC Cache Performance Boost 2.5 inch SATA III 7mm (0.28") Internal Solid State Drive

I have an old Acer Laptop - 2010 which became too slow to run windows and be of any use, it used to take several minutes to boot up and then took an age to load any application or browser. I installed Linux Mint instead of Windows and then swapped out the old hard drive for this great SSD. What an amazing difference! It boots up in under 30 seconds and applications load as quickly as my new MAC. Browser pages are snappy and responsive - there's life in the old dog yet. For £20 it's a worthwhile investment if you have a use for an old machine.

I'm really impressed with the Silicon Power 256GB A55 SSD. As usual, their products perform reliably and efficiently. The 3D NAND and SLC cache give a noticeable performance boost—boot times are super fast, apps open instantly, and overall system responsiveness has improved a lot. Installation was easy thanks to the standard 2.5-inch SATA III form factor. For the price, it's an excellent upgrade for anyone looking to boost their PC performance without spending a fortune.

So if (a couple of years ago) you had told me that a half terabyte SSD would be less than the (then) price of the same size hhd i wouldn't have believed you. Zoom forward to today and often, the even faster m.2 nvme drives are cheaper still on a per gb basis. However for builds such as the updating and speeding up of both my HP enterprize z600/z800 builds which wont easily boot from nvme, and (for the same reasons) my updated Mac Pro a1186 builds for music studios, these are the perfect addition. Faster than any given hdd, and with using it in older sata 2 systems, it will run as fast as the system underneath can chew through data.What i will mention is that, although i was initially nervous as to using a dram cacheless drive after previous issues with older equivalents from other brands, i can confidently report that the tiered nand flash approach that this drive uses is perfectly suited for the application and plenty fast.It uses a smaller and lighting fast single layer nand flash cache, (exactly as a dram cache would be utilised, but in many cases significantly faster than the old and slow ddr3 used) it then moves the data archived onto the still fast but less-so qlc nand which is the size of the drives headline capacity to store. Again at the £44 i paid this is a no brainer.Good quality, great price and no issues and all testing using crystal tools reports at least advertised speed on a fast top end HEDT platform and in some cases its actually run faster than advertised.

Quick storage and transfer speeds for one of the cheapest SSDs available. However, it can slow down a bit during larger file transfers and extended periods of use.

I purchased this SSD to breathe new life into my old laptop, and it has far exceeded my expectations. After cloning my old hard drive with free software I found online, installation was a breeze. Once I swapped out the drives, my PC now boots up in under 30 seconds—something I never thought I’d see with my old setup!The improvement doesn’t stop there. Windows updates, which used to feel like they took forever, now install in no time at all. It’s been a couple of months since I made the upgrade, and I haven’t experienced a single issue. The performance boost has been smooth and reliable, making my computer feel brand new.If you’re looking for a simple way to supercharge your laptops performance, I can’t recommend this SSD enough. It’s worth the investment!

Works greatValue for moneyAnd very fast drive

At first this SSD works passably; the data transfer speed wasn't quite what was advertised but after adding it to an aging laptop to replace a failing spinning HDD it did improve its startup time.I bought the 512 GB model in May 2024, and it spontaneously suffered a total failure in September. The laptop would not start up, and despite plugging it into multiple other machines and even a dedicated drive recovery unit, nothing could even tell it was an SSD.This listing, the product packaging, and the Silicon Power website all mention a 3 year warranty. Attempting to make use of this warranty is a miserable experience.The website's primary phone number is in Taiwan and the alternative has no international code provided but appears to be based in the USA. The product packaging has two more phone numbers in the Netherlands (which I tried calling and did not pick up) and Japan.There is also a website support form, but responses are very delayed and not very helpful. In summary: The options to return this £26 item are to ship it to the Netherlands (costing about £10) or Taiwan (a little more). Moreover, you need to fill out an "RMA application form" first, and they only accept returns with tracking or express delivery services. Apparently shipping costs can be repaid, but the process of applying for that repayment has not been explained.Perhaps most absurd though, I am informed:"Silicon Power will inspect the product and in its sole discretion repair or replace it with a comparable one based on the warranty policy."This implies they may simply claim the product is damaged and refuse to fulfil the warranty at all, probably also refusing to reimburse shipping costs in the process. Even if they do accept the product is faulty, there is no option to refund, only to receive another product which is just as likely to be faulty.Throughout this experience I am left with the impression that the business model is to sell cheaply-produced products that barely last beyond Amazon's standard warranty, while claiming to offer a longer warranty that has so many barricades that few to no customers will ever manage to make use of it.I strongly advise anyone considering these SSDs to reconsider. Rather than the low cost of an SSD, think about the cost of the data you intend to store on it; that is what you will really pay if and when it fails.