KingDian S400 120GB SSD

Rating: 5/5

The KingDian S400 120GB SSD has been proven to be an excellent storage device, considering its budget pricing. The device was purchased over KingDian's official AliExpress store:
https://kingdianssd.aliexpress.com/store/2033033?spm=2114.12010608.0.0.wmONKd

The case of the SSD is aluminum which helps with heat dissipation, while its matte coloring gives it a minimal look that should match with most people's systems.
Of course, the appearence of a product has nothing to do with the actual performance, so let's get to the benchmarking part.

I have been a linux user for near a decate and due the absense of a Windows installation on my PC I didn't bother using any of the popular Windows storage benchmarks (CrystalDiskMark).
Instead, I used some linux utilities which have also been proven to be accurate: hdparm, dd and bonnie++.

As a note, my system consists of an Intel i5-4460, 8GB dual-channel memory and runs on Debian testing.

Hdparm was used to measure the read speed of the SSD.
I run the test three times in order to verify the numbers and as you can see below, the results
were very consistent.
The read speed achived was around 520MB/s, while the cached read was around the 11000 MB/s.
You may ignore the cached read, as it is greatly dependant to the system's specifications.

Next, dd was used to test the write performance of the disk.
In order to ensure that correct results were returned, I turned off write-caching on the device
and also run the tests 3 times.
All of the tests return a consistend 220MB/s of write speed.

Lastly, I run the standard bonnie++ benchmark which shows the IO capabilites of the SSD under
Sequential and Random scenarios.
The results are more understandable on the second picture, unless you are already familiar with bonnie++'s
output.

Overall, the SSD has a great overall performance and its ~ $50 pricing is unbeatable.