Kingston XS2000 External SSD

Next-gen external USB 3.2 2x2 storage goes mainstream with Ganesh T S at the testing station.

- Ganesh T S

Portable solid state drive

The advent of high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20Gbps) along with Thunderbolt 3 (up to 40Gbps) have enabled significant improvements in the performance of portable SSDs.

The higher-speed (20Gbps+) variants had traditionally been restricted to premium devices. Additionally, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 was turning out to be an odd standard, because the new USB 4.0 standard opted to support only features of USB 3.2 Gen 2 from a backwards compatibility perspective. On both the host and device side, ASMedia was the only silicon vendor for more than a year. However, the introduction of more host platforms (Intel’s latest 600 chipset) with native support for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 and the appearance of native 20Gbps USB flash drive (UFD) controllers from Phison and Silicon Motion have enabled the 20Gbps standard to gain more traction.

The Kingston XS2000 series is the first portable SSD family to use Silicon Motion’s SM2320 platform. It’s available in three capacities (500GB, 1TB and 2TB), and the drives promise speeds of up to 2GBps. The Kingston XS2000 here utilises a flash packaged directly behind the Silicon Motion SM2320 UFD controller.

Better than expected

Under testing the bandwidth numbers for specific read workloads exceed Kingston’s claims (reaching as high as 2,089MBps for the 2TB version), but writes seem to be capped slightly north of 1,800MBps even for sequential access. All the read workloads see the three XS2000 units at the top of the charts. However, write workloads present a different story. The 2TB version performs the best of the three, and all of them land in the middle of the results.