At a glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

Small form factorInexpensiveGood everyday performance

Cons

Slows drastically during long file writes

Our Verdict

For the average user the low price of this good everyday performing 10Gbps SSD is the prime selling point. But it’s slow long write render it unsuitable for video editing and the like.

Price When Reviewed

1TB – $84.99; 2TB – $139.99

Best Prices Today: Kingston XS1000

RetailerPriceKingston$64.90View Deal$74.99View Deal$74.99View DealPrice comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwideProductPricePrice comparison from Backmarket

Kingston’s new 10Gbps XS1000 portable SSD brings the 20Gbps SX2000‘s small form factor to the masses at a more affordable price point, and with surprisingly comparable performance.

Indeed, in our real-world 48GB transfers, it actually proved quite a bit faster. Go figure. Alas, neither drive handles super-large data sets very well, as you’ll see below in the performance section.

Further reading: See our roundup of the best external drives to learn about competing products.

XS1000 price and features

Kingston sells the XS1000 in 1TB/$65 and 2TB/$110 (tested) capacities, which is considerably cheaper than the XS2000, though the latter has dropped in price significantly since our review. And the XS1000 lacks the 512GB and 4TB capacities that the XS2000 is available in.

The XS1000 is approximately 2.73 inches long (69mm), 1.27-inches wide (32mm), and 0.53-inches (13mm) thick and features a Type-C connector.

The drive is USB 10Gbps, which I’ll refer to from now on as simply 10Gbps. Kingston includes a Type-C to Type-A cable, but there’s no silicon sock as is included with the XS2000.

That said, the XS1000’s semi-gloss black finish is less prone to blemishes than the XS2000’s silver. And SSDs are so shock resistant in general, that the lack of the extra buffer isn’t a big deal — though I did like the tactile sensation of the rubber boot.

the big brother

Kingston XS2000 USB SSD

Read our reviewPrice When Reviewed:$75 for 500GB I $160 for 1TB I $285 for 2TB I $500 for 4TBBest Prices Today:$64.41 at Walmart | $69.99 at Amazon | $74.99 at B&H

The controller is a Silicon Motion SM2320, but Kingston declined to reveal the exact type of NAND inside. The company did admit that it’s 3D TLC (Triple-Level Cell, 3-bit). We’d guess lots of layers (176, 232, etc.) seeing as it’s available up to 2TB.

The XS1000’s internals are NVMe, as SATA would not be able to deliver anywhere near the performance that the XS1000 reaches.

How does the XS1000 perform?

We included the 20Gbps Kingston XS2000 in the charts so you can see exactly what, if any, advantages the pricier drive delivers. The other two drives, the SK Hynix Beetle X31 and Crucial X9 Pro are both 10Gbps SSDs like the XS1000.

Obviously, the 20Gbps XS2000 was going to dominate the synthetic benchmarks, but the XS1000 is right there with the 10Gbps competition In CrystalDiskMark 8 and AS SSD (not shown).

Random performance was largely the same, though the 20Gbps throughput of XS2000 offers no advantage over the XS1000 in this department.

When it came to the 48GB file transfers, the XS1000 was actually faster than the XS2000 by a fair margin, and faster than the 10Gbps competition.

Where things fall apart for the XS1000 is the 450GB write time. It’s nothing short of abysmal, even compared to the XS2000’s weak performance. Kingston’s XS-series SSDs are not what you want for this type of operation, though it’s an admittedly rare type of workload.

The capture below shows that the XS1000 runs out of steam — aka secondary cache (NAND written as SLC rather than TLC/QLC) — at around the 150GB mark and speed drops to between 100MBps and 200MBps from that point on.

As long as you stay away from very large data sets, the XS1000 is a good performer. Indeed, while the 450GB write was a bit tragic, that’s really not an action the average user will perform more than once in a blue moon.

Should you buy the Kingston XS1000?

We certainly can’t argue with the price of the XS1000, or its performance in the vast majority of situations. For everyday computing and data transport, it’s aces and a much better value than the XS2000.

But it’s not for prosumers banging on it constantly with large video files. Check out Crucial’s X10 Pro for help with that scenario.

How we test

Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit running on an X790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of memory total). Intel integrated graphics are used. The 48GB transfer tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk taking up 58GB of the 64GB total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which also contains the operating system. For external drives, the motherboard’s dedicated Thunderbolt 4 and 20Gbps USB ports on the rear panel are used.

Each test is performed on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that as any drive fills up, performance will decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, and other factors.

The performance numbers shown apply only to the drive we were shipped as well as the capacity tested. SSD performance can vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips to read/write across and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching (writing TLC/QLC as SLC). Vendors also occasionally swap components.

If you ever notice a large discrepancy between the performance you experience and that which we report (systems being roughly equal), by all means—let us know.

Best Prices Today: Kingston XS1000

RetailerPriceKingston$64.90View Deal$74.99View Deal$74.99View DealPrice comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwideProductPricePrice comparison from Backmarket

Author: Jon L. Jacobi, Freelance contributor

Jon Jacobi is a musician, former x86/6800 programmer, and long-time computer enthusiast. He writes reviews on TVs, SSDs, dash cams, remote access software, Bluetooth speakers, and sundry other consumer-tech hardware and software.

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