Kingston XS2000 External SSD Review

The need for fast speed storage

The term external drives or external storage has been quite an essential these days in our daily usage or lives, besides uploading your important files over the cloud or NAS most of the time, most users are still practicing traditional yet reliable way of storing it in a external physical way. Today we will look at one of the Kingston’s offering, the XS 2000 which is an external SSD with fast USB C speeds.

Unboxing

The XS2000 came with the following as below

• The XS2000 SSD
• USB C to C Cable
• Rubber Case

Features & Design

A several features that stands out on the XS2000 is the small size of the SSD, measuring only 69.54 x 32.58 x 13.5mm with weight of less than 30 grams, this is so easy to carry, that if you wish to put it in your pocket or bag, its up to you. The whole enclosure design is made of metal and plastic, which dissipates heat fast and yet at the same time, durable and reliable by just using a USB C to C cable to connect to your PC, Laptops or Mac. It can support up to USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 connection interface which gives read and write speeds up to 2000Mb/sec, which is blazing fast provided if you have the interface on your system, or otherwise it is also backwards compatible with USB A 3.x also as long you have the cable to connect it, which in fact gives flexibility on the choice, however do take note if your USB specs is lower, the speeds will go lower, but judging this is an external SSD, you still enjoy an average of 500mb/sec on USB 3.x specs, minimum on modern systems. The XS2000 came in 3 sizes of storage, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB size.

Test System & Benchmarking Performance

We will be using the following as our test setup, since our Motherboard is an AMD system, we will be limited to Thunderbolt 4 USB Type C

Above is the results we obtained from our USB C TB4 port test, and we are truly satisfied with it as the combination of the XS2000 and our test system really uses up our motherboard limited speed capability up to 1000MB reads and write which is technically accurate with also really fast access timing. So if you are using the newer USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, you definitely can get up to the 2000MB read and write speeds, or at least very near to it.

Verdict & Conclusion

The Kingston XS2000 External SSD is one small remarkable external storage with speed and portability in mind, and this is coming from a brand and controller which is reliable, coupled with the rubber case and form factor of the design, this makes it one of the storages that you could want to own as a companion with your Laptop or Mac. It is now selling at RM766 at the point of this writing via Lazada for the 1TB unit.

Special Thanks to Kingston on providing us the review unit.