Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsThere are known issues with Linux for this SSD. My unit was bricked within a year of Linux use
Reviewed in India on 13 January 2022
Review on Kingston 500GB A2000 M.2 2280 Nvme Internal SSD PCIe Up to 2000MB/S (SA2000M8/500G)
Summary:
- Do not buy this SSD if you want to use it with Linux
- My unit failed within a week or so of purchase, but I was able to get it back up after some frantic firefighting.
- It then failed again just before the one-year mark, and this time for good. It is now totally bricked.
I bought the Kingston A2000 SSD in December 2020 for use with my brand new Intel NUC kit. I was able to install and use Linux on the SSD, but there was a curious issue: the system would freeze when the power-save mode turned on after I left it un-attended for some time. So I disabled the power-save mode; in any case, the machine didn't use much power when it was unattended.
The SSD failed around the one-week mark when I started using it: the BIOS stopped recognizing it as device. I had a deadline coming up in a day or two, and all my work (lots of it ...) was on this un-detectable drive!
After some frantic Googling I was (fortunately) able to get the data out of it via a (free) Windows recovery USB tool (one of the most popular among such tools; I forget the name now, but has a long history and is well-respected). And once I got the data out (and did many other random things; I was trying all that I could think of) via Windows, the BIOS again started magically seeing the SSD, and I could boot from it again. All the data (the Linux filesystem) was there on the drive; nothing was lost as far as I could see. It was just that somehow the SSD had managed to become non-detectable as a bootable device to the BIOS, till I somehow magically got it back.
So I started using the Linux on the SSD again, but this time set up an automatic hourly backup of its important contents (basically, stuff in my home directory) to a second SSD that I connected to the 2.5" SATA interface. I also did some digging in the previous dmesg logs, and found error messages there consistent with a known issue with the Kingston A2000 SSD, related to controller failure due to broken APST (power saving) support. See the Arch Linux Wiki page on NVMe for a description of this issue, and possible workarounds.
It turns out that the machine freezing issue that I faced, was one symptom of this issue that many people reported. I set up the kernel parameter to fix this issue, as described in that link. And then everything---including the power saving mode---started working as normal. The only abnormal SSD-related things I could find, were some warning message about nvme blocks(?) that would be there in the boot log.
And then the SSD failed again, around the one-year mark. It started out with the system freezing. Logs revealed read-error messages from the file system on the SSD. I booted from a USB and tried running fsck on the SSD filesystem. This reported a lot of errors and fixed some of them. When I repeated the fsck to manually fix the rest, the SSD stopped responding altogether (the fsck did not progress). And then the system wouldn't boot at all if the SSD was inserted. My Kingston A2000 was well and truly bricked at this point.
I thankfully had the backup system on the 2.5" SSD so I could continue working. I tried off and on inserting the Kingston A2000 to see if I could get the data (most recent changes to my home directory, and some downloads etc. which I had not backed up) out of it, but the NUC consistently failed to boot up when the Kingston SSD was inserted.
I have now bought an Intel 660p series M.2 SSD to replace the bricked Kingston A2000, and I couldn't be happier! There are no more error or warning messages about nvme, and the Intel SSD is noticeably fast. This is most evident when I do system updates. Kingston A2000 was not particularly fast when doing apt upgrade, but the Intel 660p is blazing fast. So I assume this is the case for other operations as well.
I had originally bought the Kingston A2000 because it was cheaper than the Intel 660p, but in retrospect that was me being penny wise and pound foolish.
