Kingston XS2000 is the latest addition to the Kingston External Solid State Drive (SSD) market. The first mention of the Kingston XS2000 appeared at the January CES 2021.
The Kingston XS2000 series includes three models of 500 GB, 1TB and 2TB. For devices of all capacities, a data transfer rate of up to 2000 MB/s is declared. And this applies to both reading and writing. To obtain similar values, Kingston XS2000 must be connected to a USB 3.2 Gen 2X2 (USB Type-C) port with a bandwidth of up to 20 Gb/s.
Kingston XS2000, has very compact dimensions 69.54 × 32.58 × 13.5 mm, while it weighs only 28.9 grams.
In the Box
Kingston XS2000 comes in a medium-sized cardboard box. Inside the drive is additionally protected by a transparent plastic damper. Along with a rubber case and a 30 cm Type-C to Type-C connection cable.
Specs
Kingston XS2000 uses the new Silicon Motion SM2320G hardware platform. The compact chip combines a 4-channel SSD controller and a USB serial bus bridge. Silicon Motion offered not only a controller microcircuit that can work with QLC and TLC flash memory.
Returning to the Kingston XS2000, we note that the drive is equipped with an additional rubber cover, when used, the device gets additional protection from dust, water and mechanical damage. At least the manufacturer declares this by establishing compliance with the IP55 protection class.
The Kingston XS2000 comes with a 5-year manufacturer’s warranty. The total guaranteed amount of data written (TBW) is not specified by the manufacturer, but the degree of wear of the drive will still be taken into account. You can monitor this indicator in the proprietary Kingston SSD Manager application.
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Performance
While Kingston advertises speed up to 20 Gb/s we must take into account that the drive’s capabilities can be reached only when it is connected to USB 3.2 Gen 2X2, which provides a bandwidth of up to 20 Gb/s.
USB 3.2 Gen 2X2 Ports are not so common yet. This is a rarity in laptops, only a few motherboards for the AMD platform support USB 3.2 Gen 2 × 2, and in the Intel ecosystem, connectors of this standard are often found only on expensive models with the top-end Intel Z590 chipset.
In the following benchmark test, the Kingston XS2000 performs as advertised:
CrystalDiskMark
The Kingston XS2000 uses SLC caching so when copying large files the write speed will drop down to 70–75 MB/s, while the drive will attempt to increase the data transfer speed to ~ 450 MB/s.
