Kingston A400 SSD price shootout

Not Kingston’s best drive but still carries a three year warranty. While Kingston is not Intel it is nevertheless a respected name. However this is about price:

At 120GB, Amazon and Walmart are going at it cheek to jowl and head to head:

Bezos needs your money now

Wally wants your help big time!!

These giants are also battling at 240GB, same make and model, perhaps the better size choice in any event, and less than double the price of the 120GB drive.

You ask where is the Egg? Newegg is not even on the playing field, price wise. But they can, unlike the giants, offer you delivery from stock.

ETA

Incidentally, here is the enclosure I bought, since above drives at those prices can be used as boot drives or just as big old thumb drives:

My choice of enclosure

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$17.99 as of 2/11/19 at 9:30 AM

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Is there an award for the first ever Hot Deals post that doesn’t include prices?

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It’s a fair and valid point which I appreciate your having raised. Thanks. So now full disclosure:

Decision was to leave price here on a “discovery” basis. But why?

Because the price has been jumping around, up and down. Wally and Bezos are playing games with one another on this item, cat and mouse, follow the leader . . . . or not. I really have been unable to keep up with the price changes and did not want to mislead anyone. All that said:

Q: Exactly what IS the price?

The price is whatever the two players say it is at the moment you click the provided links. And I cannot promise they will have the same price or tell you in advance, before you click, which participant in this shootout will have the lower price.

ETA

At the moment of this writing both sellers are showing the same price of $17.99. That is the lowest price I have seen so far from either seller. However, I have seen higher prices than that.

Seriously dude, it’s not that hard to just put $17.99 in the title. Please do it next time.

I updated the wiki to include the price.

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Also, if anyone is considering this as a cheap alternative to a thumb drive, it makes zero sense. Name brand 128 GB usb 3.0 drives are the same price as this drive plus the cost of the enclosure ($22.99).

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Yeah. Right now I’m seeing $19.50 and $19.99 at Amzn and Wallmart respectively.

I actually bought one myself last week for $17.99

Thanks for the post, @shinobi. I didn’t realize prices had come down so much.

DDR4 price too but video card haven’t dropped as I have hoped for.

If this same situation arises once again I will handle it exactly as I handled it this go 'round. Do not assume I am here to do your personal bidding. I do things my own way. And I do not like your tone, either. You are impolite.

Yup. That is the sort of price movement I reported up thread in response to an inquiry from scripta. It would not surprise me if the price were to descend once again. Wally and Bezos are playing games with this drive.

Also just to reiterate something mentioned tangentially in the OP, the two giants appear not to be shipping from stock. They are taking orders on the come. Newegg is shipping from stock but you will pay more if unwilling to tolerate delayed delivery.

I suppose we could start debating the meaning of “Hot Deals”, but generally a hot deal is something that is much cheaper at one retailer than at others and/or is a significant discount to MSRP or actual previous sales prices.

While the prices for these drives are cheaper than someone who doesn’t follow them might expect, I wouldn’t classify them as hot deals in the sense described above. The discount offered by the two retailers is not ridiculous (according to Amazon, the list price for the 960GB version is $112.99, and it’s being sold for $99.99). The drives have simply become cheaper to make.

Thumb drives are much slower, so it makes sense if you need (want?) a fast external drive.

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Good point. If you need something consistently faster than 100 MB/sec read speed 25 MB/sec write speed, you don’t care about the size, and you trust a no-name enclosure from ebay to be fast and reliable, the combo shinobi posted could indeed make more sense than the SanDisk flash drive I posted for the same price.

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I guess I should have assumed your SSD deal post would be like your Silver Eagle Monster Box post and we’ll get a daily update of the current market value of 120 GB SSD drives. Boy am I excited about this!

Come on, really? I said “please.”

No one is playing games. 120 GB SSDs are now worth under $20.

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This was my first thought. Then I thought if the best selling enclosure on Amazon I’ve been eyeing is only $9, the electronics are pretty standard, and everything is made in China anyway, it’s plausible that we’ve reached that point already :slight_smile:.

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Agreed for certain. Bezos is not making these things in his garage. He is also not sourcing them in the USA. He is buying them in China same as I do. All you do by buying direct from China is to cut out the middleman . . . . in this instance, Bezos. Further enrichment of Bezos is not on my list of things to accomplish. :wink:

Oh, all right. I cannot resist your obvious charm. :grinning:

Course up thread a bit I was thinking you had been raised in the forest by wolves! :rofl:

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Mostly yeah but … More importantly I’d probably cough up the extra $4 just so I don’t have to wait 4-6 weeks for the ebay seller to ship direct from Hong Kong.

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Hey @shinobi !

Did you have to run disk management to get Windows to recognize the drive, or was it plug and play? Mine isn’t popping up as expected but I need to try disk mgr route…

Sorry, dunno. I missed out on the deal . . . . at least so far. :slightly_frowning_face: