Kingston XS2000 Portable SSD 4000G -SXS2000/4000G

Product Information

I have a confession to make - I may have been a bit too harsh on a review I wrote three years ago. I gave a mere three star to the product I am now writing ecstatically about today.

On paper, the Kingston XS2000 is very competitive with SanDisk's Extreme Pro v2. It not only outperformed the SanDisk and most 20Gbps competitors in read workloads and managing small datasets, but it also hung fairly tight alongside the Samsung X5. Its material mix makes for a solid and light SSD design that is water and dust-resistant, too. However, it's not quite as rugged as the SanDisk or Samsung drives, and if you don't use the rubber sleeve, the IP55 dust- and water-resistant rating isn't guaranteed.You may not have heard of them over the likes of Western Digital and Seagate, but the company has a long and excellent record in solid-state storage, including the SD700 and the compact SE730H. Adata is always coy about its hardware because it can change during a production run. But our assumption is, the SE770G uses an SMI controller, like an SM2262G. Depending on the price-point, expect a Samsung, Intel or SK Hynix NAND. The specifications of the testbed are summarized in the table below: The 2021 AnandTech DAS Testbed Configuration Also, we were sent a statement from Kingston as to why the technology is NOT compatible with Thunderbolt 4 or Thunderbolt 3: Arguably more important than the type of storage mechanism inside an external SSD is how it connects to your PC or Mac. Almost all external SSDs today plug into either some flavor of USB port, or a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 port. Best of all, you can usually get it at a good price. You can certainly pay a lot more (or a lot less) for one that doesn’t match the high performance in such a svelte design.

Our typical benchmark-test results for even run-of-the-mill external SSDs show speeds in excess of 400MBps. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature film, or a year's worth of family photos) to your external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external hard drive. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) 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. As you can see, some USB specs are tied to certain system-side physical USB connectors. We'll get into that in a moment. The drive uses a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connector, making it one of the fastest external solid state drives in its category, and matching the likes of the Samsung T7 or the Crucial X8. It also comes bundled with a raft of premium software, including a year’s subscription to Create by photo management firm MyLio, and four months of Adobe Creative Cloud. Alas, there are enough different flavors of USB to make your head spin—made worse by the confusing nomenclature surrounding USB these days. For example, today's USB 3.2 standard is for all intents and purposes identical to USB 3.1, simply renamed. (It gets even more confusing with the latest kind of USB: The forthcoming USB4 will absorb Thunderbolt.) That said, you'll still see older USB terminology on your PC or Mac and on many SSDs, so you need to know what term correlates to what.

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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) NAND holds several advantages over HDD, for instance it has no moving parts, thus in theory data won’t be affected by accidental drops or falls. NAND Flash devices tend to be smaller and lighter in comparison to HDD, but most importantly, the performance of NAND Flash devices is considerably larger than the one from HDD ones. SATA-based drives tend to be a little cheaper; they're also slower, but just fine for most users' everyday applications. SATA-based SSDs typically top out at around 500MBps for peak read and write speeds, just a bit below the ceiling of the USB 3.0 interface. (Much more about that in a moment.) However, if you're going to be transferring large files such as videos often, you may well want to spring for a PCIe/NVMe-based external SSD. That also ties in with the port you'll plug your SSD into. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

Since hard drives are mechanical devices that use mature technology, you can get relatively large amounts of storage capacity for the money. But the same tech that makes hard drives a tantalizing value becomes their biggest liability when used on the go. If you drop the drive, you could damage the interior mechanism and make your data inaccessible. By contrast, if you jolt an SSD while you're reading or writing data, there is no risk that your files will become corrupted and unreadable. 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: Need to expand the local storage on your PC or Mac for music and movies, or all the pics and videos you collect from your phone? The traditional answer has been an external hard drive. The newer, better answer is a portable solid-state drive (SSD). If none of the drives we've selected for this roundup sounds appealing to you (or you already own an extra internal SSD), there's one more option available: SSD enclosures. These are plastic or metal housings into which you can put your own SATA 2.5-inch or M.2 solid-state drive to take with you on the go.

Speeds are fair, but unspectacular through its USB 3.2 Gen1 interface. In our benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, it reached 433MBps and 427MBps in read and write speeds respectively. The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro takes a Seagate FireCuda NVMe solid-state drive, connects it to a Thunderbolt 3 interface, and puts it in a silicone-wrapped, crush-resistant aluminum case with a colossal IP67 ruggedness rating—dust-tight and able to survive 30 minutes in shallow water, without even having to close the usual rubber flap over the Thunderbolt 3 port. That adds up to a somewhat specialized device, best appreciated by videographers shooting outdoors with MacBook laptops (the kind most likely to have Thunderbolt ports), but a terrific mix of speed and sturdiness. Who It's For 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. NAND Flash is a type of non-volatile storage technology. Non-volatile simply means that NAND, unlike DRAM (or system memory), does not require power to retain data. The ability to retain data after turning off the power makes NAND a great option for external on-the-go storage devices. Also, just because you put a PCIe NVMe drive in an enclosure doesn't mean you should magically expect it to go any faster than a standard external SSD. Any drive placed in an enclosure is still subject to the peak USB speed supported by the enclosure's own electronics and controller, and by the USB protocol supported by the port you plug it into.

The testbed hardware is only one segment of the evaluation. Over the last few years, the typical direct-attached storage workloads for memory cards have also evolved. High bit-rate 4K videos at 60fps have become quite common, and 8K videos are starting to make an appearance. Game install sizes have also grown steadily even in portable game consoles, thanks to high resolution textures and artwork. Keeping these in mind, our evaluation scheme for portable SSDs and UFDs involves multiple workloads which are described in detail in the corresponding sections. Kingston's XS2000 write performance is solid within its SLC cache, but due to its DRAM-less architecture, the drive is very inconsistent once it is full. The SLC cache features both a static and dynamic portion. Our 1 TB sample wrote roughly 103GB of data at 1,890 MBps before its write performance degraded to an average rate of 214 MBps for the remainder of the test. Furthermore, the XS2000 recovered only its 6 GB static portion within a five-minute idle window, and the dynamic portion fully recovered within a longer half-hour long idle window.

The Physical USB Port: USB Type-A vs. Type-C, and More

Estimated delivery times are provided to us by the respective delivery companies. We pass this information onto you, the customer. The compact casing is a mix of metal and plastic, and the supplied rubber sleeve supports its IP55 rating for limited protection against dust ingress and splashing of liquids. 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 SK Hynix Beetle is a drive to be seen with, a great conversation starter. The Beetle is small and light enough to be taken anywhere, and it offers some protection from tumbles. Its speed is comparable to other USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSDs we have reviewed. It’s priced a little higher per gigabyte than most external SSDs, but since its capacity maxes out at 1TB, you can still have this gem without it busting your budget.