From first hand experience I would suggest the PNY drives. Have bought a handful for people and they have been very reliable and fast. There is a Team group 3D NAND 120gb drive I picked up for $38 recently. Slower than the PNY drives but so far so good.

Not sure about the Kingston drives, couple years back they had a HORRIBLE batch of budget drives that soured me on suggesting them. Just look at reviews and if there are lots of reports of early failures then avoid.

Not sure which mlcs from 201x you can't get under that used. Probably a 256 gb for that price.

I live on an island full of delusional old people and prices of used stuff are out to lunch. People think computer stuff appreciates after they buy it new. I'm probably going to pick up that Crucial 256 if it hasn't sold by tomorrow though, unless you guys have some really bad experiences with them. Crucial is a decent make right?

Not sure about most, but recently was helping my partner with a new (~250GB) SSD for her system. She came up with the Kingston A400 at first, so I started looking into reviews. They weren't pretty. The read performance wasn't bad, but write performance was worse than a HDD. It basically sounded like a return of the awful first-generation JMicron controller based devices. Particularly for OS use, a drive like that is a no-no.

"But it's a Kingston..." So? Kingston is a big brand name, but they don't actually design any of the low-level hardware they sell themselves. They use other companies' designs and slap their sticker onto it, sometimes fiddle with a few parameters but that's about it. If they use good performing parts, you get a fast drive. If not not. The Kingston brand generally guarantees good build quality and excellent service & support, but doesn't guarantee good performance, particularly not in the bottom-scraping low-end.

In the end we went for a Samsung 860 EVO, which was also not perfect (I don't like TLC...) but only a little more expensive and vastly superior to the A400. However the 860 EVO (or indeed any other current Samsung models) isn't available in the 128MB. So you'll have to do your own research. Bottom line is that you can't go by brand. Two very similar looking devices from the same brand can have totally different characteristics. So find reviews of the individual drives (proper ones, not user reviews with n=1 syndrome) and see what's available around the pricepoint you're aiming for. In general random reads & writes are the most important metric.

Kingston also put out a dud of a USB 3.0 flash drive. The write speed on the thing is many times slower then my old USB 2.0 sticks. Complete junk.

Thanks guys, that's exactly the sort of feedback I was looking for. 😀

We've had several Team Group L5 SSDs failing at work lately, so I'd certainly recommend to avoid them. Our daily drivers are Samsung 850s which seem pretty reliable. At home I have an 860 and a Crucial BX100 250GB which literally takes daily hammering the last two years and it's still fine...

I don't know much about current SSDs, but in the past there have been Micron C400 128GB (MLC) drives on eBay (US) for about $30-$35. I don't know if that pricing is still out there or not. I bought 5 of them, but really just two of them have had significant use by me. No problems yet. All 5 that I bought are HP branded. 4 of them came with minimal remnants of a Win7 install and SMART showed low hours and 99% life left. The 5th (bought later) was also HP branded but had more hours, a fresh Win10 install and showed 90% life left.
I think there must have been a boatload of HP laptops containing these drives that got stripped for parts by somebody a couple years ago. Drive #5 was probably out of that same group, but used by somebody else before I got to it.

I like these drives because they're Micron/Crucial, they're MLC, and the chips are an older style that has the pins sticking out the sides (not BGA). If something bad happened, I could at least try reflowing those pins, unlike a BGA which are completely unserviceable.

Transfer rate isn't as important as random access, but for what it's worth, modern 128GB drives might have slow transfer rates due to using a small number of chips to reach that capacity (so less parallelism). But maybe modern SSDs have solved that problem so maybe it's outdated thinking. It used to be that the smallest capacities of a given generation would be slow. Don't know if that's still true.

The Crucial 256MB MX100 sounds like a good deal, assuming it hasn't been beaten up. If the seller knows how to check the drive health then that would make the sale for me. Micron/Crucial are definitely a good brand.

I always stuck with SanDisk/Crucial/Intel/Samsung for SSDs. 128GB SanDisk X110s and various Samsung ones can regularly be had under $35 on ebay.