Kingston XS2000 Portable SSD 4000G -SXS2000/4000G

Product Information

The availability of all three capacity points enables us to compare the XS2000 against almost all previously reviewed USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drives. The list of portable SSDs evaluated as part of this review is provided below:

High-speed Capacities: Up to 2TB 2 to support high resolution images, 8K videos, and large documents. The Seagate OneTouch is a flawless portable SSD, offering exactly what you’d expect - and then a bit more. So a folder that take about three minutes to be transferred on a portable hard drive will take less than one minute on all but the slowest portable SSD. How to choose the best portable SSD for you

SK Hynix Beetle X31

When choosing which portable SSD is best, the main focus is usually on storage capacity, transfer speeds, size and weight, and durability, External solid-state drives are, essentially, internal SSDs (the same kind that power laptops or live inside desktops) with an outer shell and some bridging electronics. As a result, external drives use one of two internal "bus types" that, in part, dictate their peak speed: Serial ATA (SATA), or PCI Express (PCIe). The latter is usually associated these days with Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), a protocol that is optimized for the characteristics of SSDs and speeds up data transfers.

The Kingston XS2000 series is the first portable SSD family to use Silicon Motion's SM2320 platform. Available in three capacities - 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, the drives promise speeds of up to 2000 MBps. The company sent across samples of all three capacity points in the lineup to put through our rigorous direct-attached storage evaluation process. The review below presents the detailed evaluation report of drives, with emphasis on the aspects that were not covered in the UFD controller preview. Introduction and Product Impressions RUGGEDIZATION. The degree of ruggedness does vary from drive to drive, with drives like the ADATA SE800 leading the field at the moment among mainstream-price external SSDs. IP68 certification is a good spec to look for if you're serious about waterproof and dustproof drives. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) The best portable SSDs offer a range of capacities - they can be anywhere from 50GB (ideal for more casual use or lots of smaller files like Word docs) to 2TB, which is a better choice when throwing images, videos, and other media into the mix. If you’re working to a specific budget, remember the more storage space, the higher the price.

Pocket-sized portability.

Works with smartphones A little-advertised feature is that most of the newer portable SSDs have a native Type-C connector that can be plugged into any recent smartphones and be used as storage for your portable device.

COST PER GIGABYTE. The way to calculate relative value on drives like these is to perform some simple math and figure the cost per gigabyte based on the price of a given drive on the day you're shopping. Because SSD pricing fluctuates all the time, relative value does, too. Kingston Technology Europe Co LLP and Kingston Technology Company, Inc., are part of the same corporate group (“Kingston”). Kingston is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. From big data, to laptops and PCs, to IoT-based devices like smart and wearable technology, to design-in and contract manufacturing, Kingston helps deliver the solutions used to live, work and play. The world’s largest PC makers and cloud-hosting companies depend on Kingston for their manufacturing needs, and our passion fuels the technology the world uses every day. We strive beyond our products to see the bigger picture, to meet the needs of our customers and offer solutions that make a difference. To learn more about how Kingston Is With You, visit Kingston.com. Inside, you’ll find a SN550E, a PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe drive that pairs an ASMedia ASM2362 bridge with a SanDisk 20-82-10023 controller and SanDisk BiCS 4 96L 3D TLC flash memory. During our benchmarking with CrystalDiskMark, the drive reached 1046MBps (read) and 1013MBps (write). Other benchmarks delivered the same range of results but transferring a single 10GB file proved to be slower than expected. Yes. I cannot think of any scenario where it wouldn't be the case and just to confirm, we're talking of portable hard drives (the ones that can be carried around, smaller cousins of desktop or external hard drives). Hard drives are slower because they are mechanical; the data is stored on physical platters and accessed via a head located on an arm; similar to a turntable reading vinyls.The Crucial X9 Pro is a competitively priced, highly portable external SSD that should appeal to most anyone. The X9 Pro is great for travelers, or indeed anyone who wants a fast, reasonably rugged and secure portable SSD. Overall, the XS2000 did well in our performance tests. Its Crystal DiskMark sequential read score of 1,977MBps is typical of a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drive, and essentially matches its 2,000MBps rated speed. Its write speed is rated the same but we saw only 1,762MBps, the slowest among the Gen 2x2 drives we tried, but that's still much faster than any USB 3.2 Gen 2 drive. (Their write speeds max out at about 1,000MBps.)

Yes: Again, hard drives are slower because they have to physically rotate disks and move a reader arm to access your data. Just how much faster is it to read data from flash cells than from particular points on spinning platters? Typical throughput for consumer hard drives is in the range of 100MBps to 200MBps, while SSDs that support Thunderbolt 3 or 4, or USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, can have read and write speeds pushing 2,000MBps or even higher. (One factor in hard drive speed is spin rate—among external drives, 5,400rpm units are more common and more affordable than 7,200rpm.) The specifications of the testbed are summarized in the table below: The 2021 AnandTech DAS Testbed Configuration

Many SSDs come with cables for both kinds (Type-A and Type-C) at the computer end, or one cable plus an adapter. Two full cables is generally best, as adapters can be awkward and easy to lose. You'll want to match what comes in the box with the ports your PC has (and has free). Also, match specs; spending extra, for example, for a 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSD if you only have 5Gbps-capable ports may be pointless. Sturdier Because there's no moving parts, the SL200 is a bit more ruggedized than any external consumer hard drives. It should survive a drop on a hard surface from a few feet unscathed.