Introduction

With revenue in the multi-billion dollars, Kingston is the largest DRAM and flash memory product vendor in the world. While their strongest suit is in memory modules and USB/flash card storage, Kingston are also a major player in the SSD market, which, besides internal storage, includes portable SSDs, too.

Today we are reviewing the Kingston XS1000 portable SSD. This is the smaller brother to the XS2000 that was released in 2021. While the XS2000 uses the USB 3.2 2×2 20 Gbps interface, the XS1000 is built with support for USB 3.2 Gen 2, i.e. 10 Gbps. Kingston’s intention here is to offer a portable solid-state drive for the masses—most of which don’t have system with USB 3.2 2×2 support. Under the hood, both drives are quite similar, they are built using a Silicon Motion SM2320 controller. This controller combines the USB bridge chip and SSD controller in a single processor, which not only reduces space requirements, but is also cheaper and lowers the design complexity significantly. The XS1000 uses 112-layer 3D TLC NAND flash, a DRAM cache chip is not installed.

We review the Kingston XS1000 in the 2 TB variant, which retails for $110, but it is also available as a 1 TB model. The warranty is set to five years for all these models.