Kingston XS2000 Portable SSD 4000G -SXS2000/4000G

Product Information

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.

The XS2000 is a great choice as a general-purpose ultraportable drive, as long as you don't need frills like hardware-based data encryption. Our only caveat? Take what we always say about how easy it is to accidentally lose a portable SSD, and double it. 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.

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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. 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. 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.

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. As you can see, some USB specs are tied to certain system-side physical USB connectors. We'll get into that in a moment. Testing the drive, we found speeds were good. Our benchmarking with CrystalDiskMark: showed read speeds of 1062MBps and write speeds of 999MBps. In fact, the drive is touted as the world's fastest native USB SSD. The key word here is ‘native’, since it uses the USB 3.2 Gen 2 x 2 interface. 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.

High-speed capacities.

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.

External SSDs are now readily available and cheaper than they were a few years ago, but it will probably be a while before they are a complete replacement for hard drives. Physically larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still mostly use 3.5-inch platter drives inside, taking advantage of their vast capacities and much lower prices per gigabyte compared with SSDs. Finally the Kingston XS2000 bested the Adata Elite SE880, though it had a distinct advantage with 2TB of capacity (more NAND for secondary cache) over its rival’s 1TB. One of the XS2000’s advantages is that it’s available in 2TB/4TB capacities. Each test is performed on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Over time, as a drive fills up, performance will decrease due to less NAND for caching and other factors. The performance numbers shown apply only to the drive of the capacity tested. SSD performance can vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes across and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching. Bottom line Custom made and designed products such as flash memory products with custom logo’s on them. E,g USB flash drives and memory cards with your own logo At the time of writing, there are far cheaper 2TB USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives available on the market. The Crucial X8 remains the undisputed price champion with a price tag that’s a third less than the XS2000 at the time of writing.Another recommendation would be the VAVA Portable SSD touch which comes with a fingerprint scanner.Our dedicated team has gone the extra mile to test and review nearly all of the best portable SSDs on the market, and we're here to delved deep into each drive's speed, storage capacity, connectivity, design, and overall performance. External USB drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 64-bit running on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combo with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM3242 USB 3.2×2 card. Copy tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk using 58GB of the 64GB total memory. High-speed Capacities: Up to 2TB 2 to support high resolution images, 8K videos, and large documents. The answer is - unsurprisingly - yes. See an internal SSD is just a bunch of components inside a casing (either plastic or metal), an enclosure that actually protects the electronics inside. Protecting it with an outer case is therefore superfluous unless you want to physically hide the drive for whatever reason or want to make it look more aesthetic. On others, though, the connector might be a Micro-USB Type-B, which is a flat, wide connector that is different from any USB port you'll see on a laptop or desktop.