Silicon Power Ace A55, 256GB 3D NAND SATA 6Gb/s, 2.5" Internal Solid State Drive

Great for refurbishing an old machine you have laying around and sending it out the door with a new lease on life.Used for my nephew's computer I build him for Christmas, with an AMD FX 6300, 8gb of RAM, Asus MA-970 chipset motherboard with garbage ASMedia hard drive controller. It actually sped the thing up nice with a legit copy of Windows 10 (using the Windows 7 key for authorization as it was tied to the motherboard on an OEM license).Nary an issue, works great, and was nice and fast.Great for:Kid's computernon-production machines for net uselight to medium-duty Laptopmachines you are gifting away, to friends, family, or grand-maStorage for media files (get the bigger model, but check prices against more known brands first)Not to great for:Content creation, or other heavy-duty multimedia work like video editing or game design. Get an NVME or high-end sata drive for that, you'll thank yourself later.Saving large pictures when working with 4k or higher, get something like an NVME drive for this again.Conclusion:For all those times when it doesn't pay to spend the extra 10~20$ to get a super-fancy brand, as not everyone needs that nor will notice the difference, these drives fit the bill. I have no complaints and have had a few SP brand drives without any issue. Just go in knowing that, while they're much much faster than any hard drive could ever hope to be, they're not the fastest thing out there, nor will they set any speed records. The top-half of the drive is plastic, vs some other drives that have a complete metal enclosure. The drive does not go fast enough to warrant metal for heat-dissipation, so as not to worry, otherwise it wouldn't be designed this way.This is a solid mainstream drive and is marketed as such. No gimmicks, no run-around.To that end, I got what I paid for, no hassle & no complaints what-so-ever.If your drive gets slow after an unplanned shutdown (as all Hard Drives or SSD's can), please open an Administrator-level command prompt (CTRL+SHIFT+CLICK) and type "CHKDSK /F C:" (provided C: is your SSD), and press enter. If it asks to do it after a restart, press Y and hit enter. Then save your work and restart the machine and wait patiently for a minute or two (or less!) while the machine checks the drive for loose files laying about. The machine will be faster after it auto-restarts upon completion.This holds true for any drive OF ANY BRAND in a modern computer, and is due to the fact that an unplanned shutdown will mark the disk as dirty making the drive double-check where everything is, causing quite a bit of wait time for the CPU, resulting in slower performance and hitching in games or other applications. So write down that command and keep it for later incase the power goes out or the machine locks up or gets slow.--Best of luck and GREAT PRODUCT!

This is not my first Silicon Power SSD overall, however it is my first in this form factor. All I can say is that Silicon Power outdoes most of the competitors at a much better storage to cost value. They are fast, reliable and great quality. I would recommend this for anything from everyday use (speeding up boot times from a standard Hard Disk Drive) to gaming (speeding up load times and streamlining game-play). I bought this one specifically to replace a failing HDD in a laptop.

MUST BUY!!!! DO NOT PASS THESE UP, and DO NOT LISTEN TO THE BAD REVIEWS - THEY CLEARLY HAVE THEM SET UP IMPROPERLY!!!Ok so first and foremost, anyone claiming speeds arent withing a few megabytes of rated numbers then there is an issue with the way it is set up in YOUR system, and not a reason for a bad review. First, make sure that the drive(s) are AHCI enabled in BIOS, and not set to IDE or some other setting, and if you dont know what that means or dont know how to do it well then thats also not SPs fault and not a reason to give less than 5 stars. Second, make sure that you are using STATA III cables rated to handle 6gb/s transfer speeds (Notice i said "gb/s" and not "GB/s" BIG difference in those abbreviations). Third, make sure that the SSD has T.R.I.M. enabled in OS and lastly, Forth, make sure the drive is properly aligned (and i dont mean when you install it), especially if you clone your OS onto it and use it as your boot drive. If it isnt properly aligned regardless of the rest of the settings youll be lucky to get anything over what a standard HDD transfers at, if that.Now, with that out of the way, these drives are awesome especially for the money. They cost about half what the comparable Samsung drive or Corsair drive costs, yet performs identically. I tested singled drive, and got 535Mb/s R and 515Mb/s W.Then of course i tested them for the real reason i bought 2 (because lets face it why buy 2 and not use in RAID?) and tested the setup in RAID 0, 4k aligned, AHCI, and got 1Gb/s R and 775Mb/s W. WOW. Just a few megs shy of what my Samsung SSDs performed at. Again, better than expected performance for less than half the cost of the bigger brands.4k reads were 300Mb/s which jumped to over 500mb/s at 8k and 161mb/s writes which jumped to ~300mb/s at 8k. After 32k, write performance was sustained at AVERAGE of 550mb/s peaking at 775mb/s and my reads were at 874 meg/s, however 1 more increment up to 64k and reads were sustained at 1gb/s consistently regardless of block size (64k through 4mb)I didnt rate support because i dont use it nor will i in the future, so.... yeah, but im sure they are fine and do what they can within their obvious limits. Hope this review helps someone, anyone, everyone!