INTRODUCTION

   It's been somewhat long since SATA and mSATA SSDs were last considered as hardware components aimed only for the niche/enthusiast market so if you're out looking for an entry-level model things may not get much better than they are today (although they probably will). Now as many of you know the very first SSDs used MLC NAND flash (multi-layer cell) with just a few exceptions (far more expensive ones) that used much faster SLC NAND flash (single-layer cell). Both types are used today as well (although it's been a while since I’ve seen an SLC based model) in addition to the rather new TLC NAND (triple-level cell) which although not as fast as the previously mentioned it comes at a much lower cost. We've seen quite a few TLC NAND flash based SSDs in the past year by most manufacturers but unfortunately Kingston’s first TLC model was the SSDNow UV300 which never made it in the EU and USA (India and Russia if i recall correctly). The brand new Kingston SSDNow UV400 model is a more advanced model compared to the UV300 line and with us today we have the 480GB variant.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, New Zealand, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America.

   Just like the Trion 150 line of SSDs by OCZ Kingston chose to use Toshiba 15nm 2D planar Triple-Level Cell (TLC) NAND flash memory for the brand new UV400 line (at least for now) but they paired it with the quad channel Marvell 88SS1074 NAND flash controller and a 512MB LPDDR3 1600 DRAM module by Nanya (roughly 8GB of the TLC flash is treated as SLC cache). We last saw this exact same controller in the new MX300 line by Crucial and its features include power loss protection, active garbage collection, redundant array of independent NAND (RAIN), LDPC error correction code (ECC), adaptive thermal protection, data-path protection, multistep data integrity algorithm, TRIM, SMART, AES 256-bit hardware encryption, TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 (fully compatible with Microsoft's eDrive). Kingston reports an endurance level of 200TBW (Total Bytes Written) for the 480GB model with an MTBF of 1 million hours and covers it with a 3 year limited warranty with free technical support.