Kingston XS1000 External SSD Review

Just like its faster sibling, the XS2000, Kingston's latest external SSD, the XS1000 is tiny. Never mind pocket-sized, at just 69.54 x 32.58 x 13.5mm and weighing in at a mere 30g (thanks to its metal and plastic construction), it's small enough and light enough to get lost in a pocket. At the time of writing, just two capacities make up the XS1000 product line, 1TB and 2TB, the latter model we are reviewing here.

The drive is built around a Silicon Motion SM2320 controller and 3D TLC NAND. Kingston hasn't stated how many layers the NAND has on the spec sheet but a good guess might be that it's the same 96-layer 3D TLC NAND used by the XS2000. Silicon Motion's SM2320 controller makes tiny drives like the XS1000 possible as it has a built-in USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 interface, so there is no bridge chip taking up space. The other plus point with the SM2320 is that by doing away with the bridge chip it brings much better performance. Although the 4-channel controller can run at USB 3.2 Gen 2 X2 speeds (20Gb/s), the XS1000 is only running at USB 3.2 Gen 2 X1 speed (10Gb/s). The SM2320 also supports AES 256-bit encryption, but Kingston hasn't taken advantage of this feature with the XS1000.

Kingston rates the XS1000 at up to 1,050MB/s for Sequential reads and up to 1,000MB/s for writes. With the ATTO and ASSSD benchmarks, we couldn't get that close to the official maximums, but with CrystalDiskMark 8 we got much closer. The best-read figure we saw from the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark was 1,030MB/s (using the default test and Peak Performance profile test, both using QD8 T1 settings) while the best-write figure we got was 932MB/s (default test, QD8 T1).

With our real-life file transfer tests, the read performance was very consistent when dealing with large transfers, with ten out of the fourteen transfers topping 1GB/s, ranging from 1,011MB/s up to 1,031MB/s. Overall the drive averaged 932MB/s for the fourteen tests, with the fastest transfers being the 100GB Data file, 4K Movie Clips folder and the 5GB image transfers at 1,031MB/s with the slowest being the 50GB file folder at 304MB/s. Writes averaged out at 736MB/s for the fourteen tests, the fastest was once again the 100GB Data file at 936MB/s with the 50GB file folder again slowest at 278MB/s.

The XS1000 doesn't come with any hardware encryption (which may put off potential business users), nor does it have an IP protection rating but it is backed with a 5-year warranty.

We found the 2TB Kingston XS1000 for £106.99 on Kingston's site HERE. Kingston also sent us retail links for Ebuyer and Box, with pricing around £106.49.

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Pros

• Overall Performance.
• Diminutive size.

Cons

• Lacks hardware encryption.
• No IP rating.

KitGuru says: Another tiny, pocket-sized drive from Kingston mixing portability with strong performance, especially when it comes to reads.

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