Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Kingston XS1000 2TB has a minimalistic look to it. The drive is small, easily fitting into a pocket or a backpack compartment. The light weight will also not add much to your everyday carry. Unlike the Crucial X9 Pro 2TB, the XS1000 is shorter and thicker. Its height measures in at 13.5 mm, while its length is 69.54 mm, and its width is 32.58 mm. The look of the Kingston XS1000 2TB is drastically different from the Crucial X9. While the X9 went for a thin card-shaped drive, the XS1000 has less width. Both are small and aimed at portability, but each has a different design focus.
The Kingston XS1000 2TB has a solid black color finish all the way around. It is mostly made out of metal with some plastic components. Right in the middle of the drive, the Kingston branding is found in white, which keeps the front simple enough. Towards the right of the lettering, the drive curves downwards, reducing any hard edges. A portable SSD with sharp corners would not be great, and Kingston has done well to limit hard corners. Towards the left of the lettering, the shape is more rectangular rather than curving downwards. On this end, we also find the USB Type-C connector. A small LED lights up when the drive is plugged in. In terms of durability, I am not necessarily the most enthusiastic, as the plastic components could break on impact. Kingston has also not provided any ingress protection, or IP, rating, so I would keep the XS1000 away from excessive dust or water.
The included cable is rather short, however, not much more is required for a portable drive. The cable is rubber and easily flexes to accommodate different ways of plugging the drive in. Short cables are useful for portable applications, which this drive definitely is focused on. One shortcoming is this drive has USB Type-C on one end, while the other has Type-A. As far as portability is concerned, I find this is a negative. Many laptops today, especially Apple, have done away with the full-sized port on their devices, meaning an adapter or different cable is required for Type-A ports. The benefit of having Type-C on both ends of the cable means the drive can be plugged into almost anything modern, and I would have appreciated a second cable included for this purpose.
The bottom of the Kingston XS1000 2TB is rather simple. There is a sticker with the typical regulatory information and some other specifications of the drive. The sticker sits in a bit of a recess in the drive, so it is never touching the surface it sits on. There are no rubber corners or change in material on the back of the drive to provide some grip, which is often difficult to achieve anyway with such a light and compact drive. However, the exposed metal does mean you want to keep it away from resting it on anything that is prone to scratching.
One other thing to note is that there is no sort of data protection, whether in the form of encryption or by other means. This is not too surprising given this is a consumer product. It might have been nice to see, as its small size could mean users may accidentally lose it. However, Kingston does have other products in their lineup with encryption if this is a concern.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G
CPU Cooling: AMD Wraith STEALTH
Motherboard: ASUS TUF Gaming B450M-Pro S
RAM: XPG GAMMIX D10 DDR4-3200 2x8GB
Graphics: ASUS Dual GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
Chassis: Thermaltake Ceres 300 TG ARGB Snow
Storage: Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB
Power: Corsair VS600 600W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home
Compared Hardware:
- Kingston XS1000 2TB
- ADATA Elite SE880 1TB
- Crucial X10 Pro 2TB
- Crucial X9 Pro 2TB
- Crucial X6 2TB
- Crucial X8 1TB
- Crucial X8 2TB
- LaCie Mobile SSD 500GB
- LaCie Rugged SSD 1TB
- Lexar SL660 BLAZE 1TB
- Lexar Professional SL100 Pro 500GB
- Western Digital Black P50 Game Drive SSD 1TB
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Conclusion
