Kingston XS2000 Portable Solid State Drive

Model: Kingston XS2000 Portable Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: Kingston
Provided By: Kingston

As the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products, Kingston Technology doesn't need much of an introduction. The company got its start in 1987, when the computer industry was suffering from a severe shortage of surface-mount memory chips. To provide a solution, Kingston's founders designed a new Single In-Line Memory Module (SIMM) that used readily available, older technology through-hole components. Today, Kingston offers more than 2,000 memory products including SD cards, SSD drives, memory modules and USB flash drives for consumers, businesses, enterprises and system builders.

This past fall, Kingston launched its latest portable SSD, the XS2000. Designed with content creators, prosumers and corporate professionals in mind, this pocket-sized, portable drive is powered by Silicon Motion's new SM2320 controller and is available with up to 2TB of 3D TLC NAND flash for storage of high-res images, 8K videos, and large documents. The XS2000 is also equipped with a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface that can transfer data at speeds up to 2,000 MB/s. To top it all off, the drive works with Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS and comes with a rubber sleeve that makes it water resistant, dust resistant and shockproof.

The XS2000 is available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. For this review, Kingston sent us the 1TB version of the drive which is capable of reading and writing at up to 2,000 MB/s.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the XS2000 has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Kingston's new portable SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the XS2000 have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we've come to expect from Kingston? Keep reading as we find out.

The XS2000 comes in a small white and gray box. The front advertises many of the drive's key features including its 1TB capacity, 2000 MB/s read and write speeds, USB-C interface and 5 year warranty. The back of the box provides a bit more information regarding the XS2000's box contents and supported operating systems. There is also a small window that lets you see the drive and view the part and serial numbers. Inside, you'll find the SSD, a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 USB-C cable and removable rubber sleeve.

Physical Features:

The XS2000 is one of the smallest portable SSDs to come through the 'Labs. Measuring 69.54 x 32.58 x 13.5 mm and weighing a mere 28.9g, the drive fits comfortably in the palm of a hand as well as your pocket.

Despite being compact and lightweight, the XS2000 is very well constructed. The body of the drive is primarily black plastic. However, the top and bottom panels are metal and are covered by a nice looking silver finish.

The XS2000 is IP55 rated to withstand water and dust and, with the included rubber sleeve, can withstand minor drops. The rubber sleeve also makes it a lot easier to hang onto the drive and really doesn't add much to the overall size and weight.

The XS2000's USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C port is located on the end of the drive. This interface not only transfers data, but provides power for the device. To the left of the USB port there is also a small LED that lights up blue when the XS2000 is powered on and will flash when transferring data.

If you were to crack the XS2000 open, you'd find Silicon Motion's new SM2320 controller. Designed for use in portable SSDs, this DRAM-less controller solution features an on-chip USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface as well as four NAND flash channels. The SM2320 also includes Silicon Motion's NANDXtend ECC end-to-end data path protection and supports up to 4TB of capacity using the latest TLC and QLC NAND.

The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 3700x CPU, MSI B550 GAMING PLUS motherboard, 16GB (8GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix 3200 MHz DDR4 memory, Crucial P5 1TB SSD, GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card and an ORICO PE20-1C USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 PCIe expansion card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 10 Pro.

To test the performance of Kingston's XS2000 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark 8. For comparison, I've also included test results from the Crucial X8, Lexar NQ100, Samsung 870 EVO, Samsung 870 QVO, SK hynix Gold S31, ADATA Ultimate SU750, Samsung 860 QVO, Samsung 860 PRO, Crucial MX500, Plextor M8V, Crucial BX300, ADATA Ultimate SU900, Plextor S3C, Toshiba OCZ VX500, ADATA Ultimate SU800, Plextor S2C, Crucial MX300, Plextor M7V, PNY CS1311, OCZ Trion 150, PNY CS2211, Plextor M6V, Crucial BX200, OCZ Trion 100, Kingston HyperX Savage, Crucial MX200, OCZ Vector 180, Kingston BX100, Samsung 850 EVO M.2, Samsung 850 EVO mSATA, AMD Radeon R7, Silicon Power Slim S80, Samsung SSD 850 EVO, OCZ ARC 100, SanDisk Ultra II, Crucial MX100, SanDisk Extreme Pro and Samsung SSD 850 PRO.

As I mentioned earlier, the XS2000 is based on Silicon Motion's SM2320 controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.

CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4:

First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential and random read and write speeds. For this test, we're using the peak and real world profiles.

According to Kingston, the XS2000 is capable of reading and writing at speeds up to 2,000 MB/s when plugged into a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port. While the drive had no problems reaching its rated read speed, it came up a bit short in CrystalDiskMark's sequential write speed test.

As you'd expect, the XS2000 wasn't quite as fast when tested with the "real world" profile which uses a single thread and a much lower queue depth. Nevertheless, it was still able to read at 1,879 MB/s and write at more than 1,728 MB/s.

HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:

Next, I used HD Tach to test the Kingston XS2000's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.

Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the XS2000 had average read and write speeds of 826.6 MB/s and 463.2 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 531.5 MB/s.

ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01:

I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the XS2000's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 512B to 64 MB and the total length set to 256MB.

When tested with ATTO, the XS2000's read speeds topped out at about 1.93 GB/s and its write speeds at 1.74 GB/s.

AS SSD:

AS SSD is a benchmark designed specifically for solid state drives. The application contains five synthetic tests which are used to determine the sequential and random read and write performance of a drive.

Kingston XS2000 1TB

Crucial X8 1TB

AS SSD also includes a copy benchmark. This test copies an ISO (two large files), program (many small files) and game (small and large files), returning the speed and duration of each.

Kingston XS2000 1TB

Crucial X8 1TB

HD Tune Pro 5.75:

Next, I ran a series of tests using HD Tune Pro. This hard disk utility measures a drive's performance by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its access time, burst rate and CPU usage. For this review, I'm also going to use it to benchmark the XS2000's random read and write speeds, random access times and the number of operations per second.

Kingston XS2000 1TB - Read Benchmark

Crucial X8 1TB - Read Benchmark

Kingston XS2000 1TB - Write Benchmark

Crucial X8 1TB - Write Benchmark

The XS2000 performed relatively well when benchmarked with HD Tune. The drive had average read and write speeds of 1774.8 MB/s and 651.9 MB/s, respectively.

Kingston XS2000 1TB - Random Access Read

Crucial X8 1TB - Random Access Read

Kingston XS2000 1TB - Random Access Write

Crucial X8 1TB - Random Access Write

When writing 4KB blocks, the XS2000 reached 5,339 IOPS and had an average speed of 20.856 MB/s. The drive was faster when reading, reaching 18,105 IOPS with an average speed of 70.726 MB/s.

Anvil's Storage Utilities:

Anvil's Storage Utilities is another benchmark designed with SSDs in mind. The standard storage benchmark measures a drive's performance by testing its transfer speeds, access times and IOPS.

Iometer:

Lastly, I ran a series of tests using Iometer. This tool can be configured to benchmark a number of things. In this case, I used it to measure the XS2000's read and write speeds and the number of operations per second. The tests were run using random bytes and a queue depth of 3.

The XS2000's performance was very similar to what we saw in our other tests. The drive was able to read at 1,965.35 MB/s and write at 1,694.41 MB/s.

The XS2000 wasn't one of the faster drives we've tested when it came to random reads and writes. In our tests, the drive was able to read at 94.44 MB/s and write at 72.36 MB/s.

Kingston really doesn't say what the XS2000 is capable of in regards to IOPS. In our tests, the drive reached 24,178 random read IOPS and 18,525 random write IOPS. Increasing the queue depth had little impact on the XS2000's random write performance. However, with four threads and the queue depth set to 32, the drive was able to reach 53,743 random read IOPS.

Vantage PCMark 8 - Storage Test:

PCMark 8 is a complete benchmark for Windows. It includes five benchmark tests, each designed around a specific scenario. The storage benchmark measures drive performance using real-world traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games.

PCMark 8 also includes a consistency test which measures the performance consistency and degradation tendency of a storage system. The test reports the performance level at the start, the degraded steady-state and the recovered state as well as the number of iterations required to reach them. For this test, we are focusing on the Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) trace and will look at both the bandwidth and latency of the drive

The XS2000 didn't do as well as the other SSDs in this test. Its bandwidth dropped below 10 MB/s during the degrade and steady phases, pushing its latency above the 4,000ms mark. The XS2000 never really recovered either, topping out at a mere 101 MB/s.

PCMark 10 - Full System Drive Benchmark:

PCMark 10's Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. This benchmark produces an overall score as a measure of drive performance. Comparing devices is as simple as comparing scores. The tests also measure and report the bandwidth and average access time performance for the drive.

TRIM Performance:

While SSD's offer many benefits, there are some downsides to using flash memory. One of the biggest issues people run into is performance degradation. Over time, an SSD will run out of fresh blocks and will have to write over data the file system has marked as deleted. This procedure is very complicated and can slow an SSD's write speeds considerably.

To fix this problem, most manufacturers have added TRIM support to their SSDs. The TRIM command allows an operating system, such as Windows 10, to tell an SSD which data blocks are no longer in use. Using this information, the drive pro-actively erases these blocks and adds them to the free block pool.

To test the XS2000's TRIM and garbage collection functions, I first put the drive in a "dirty" state. I used Iometer to fill 80% of the drive and then ran a random write test for 30 minutes. This had little impact on the XS2000's read speed. However, its average writing speed dropped to 64.07 MB/s.

Kingston XS2000 - Dirty

To see how well the XS2000 could recover, I let the computer sit for about 30 minutes and then reran the test. The drive wasn't able to reach the factory fresh performance shown in our earlier tests. However, its sequential write speed jumped up to 1688.74 MB/s.

Kingston XS2000 - After TRIM

Unfortunately, the XS2000 does not support the secure erase function so I was not able to wipe the drive with Parted Magic. Instead, I did a quick wipe and format from within Windows. After this, the XS2000 was able to read at 834.93 MB/s and write at 1708.69 MB/s.

 
Kingston XS2000 - Secure Erased

Final Thoughts:

With the XS2000, Kingston has shown us that good things do come in small packages. This pocket-sized, portable SSD is both solidly constructed and lightweight. In addition to its metal and plastic casing, the drive includes a removable rubber sleeve that makes it water resistant, dust resistant and shockproof. On the inside, the XS2000 is powered by Silicon Motion's new SM2320 controller and is available with up 2TB of 3D TLC NAND flash. Combine this with a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface and you have a portable SSD that's capable of some pretty impressive performance. In our sequential read and write tests, the XS2000 was able to read at speeds as high as 2,059 MB/s and write at speeds in excess of 1,862 MB/s.

The Kingston XS2000 is available now in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Prices on Amazon.com currently range from $85 up to $240, with the 1TB version reviewed here retailing for about $145.

Highs:

• Available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities
• Lightweight, compact design
• Silicon Motion SM2320 controller
• Equipped with 3D TLC NAND
• USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface
• Excellent sequential read and write speeds
• Water resistant, dust resistant and shockproof with included rubber sleeve
• Works with Windows, Mac, Linux and ChromeOS
• Reasonably priced
• 5 year warranty

Lows:

• Mediocre random read and write performance