The Kingston XS1000 is the company's USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps portable solid-state-drive for the masses. It uses the Silicon Motion SM2320G controller, which combines the USB interface and SSD controller into a single IC. This helps reduce cost and complexity, as just one instead of two chips is required. Obviously, this also means that drives can be more compact, because components are more tightly integrated. In terms of NAND flash, we found Toshiba's BiCS5 112-layer 3D TLC NAND. These are the components on our reviewed drive, Kingston confirmed to us that they do not guarantee any specific components, but they do guarantee that the product always meets or exceeds its rated specifications. Unlike many other vendors, which build external SSDs by including a full-sized M.2 NVMe inside the case, Kingston was smart, choosing to go with a proper, highly compact design. As a result, you get a tiny portable high-performance SSD—most competitor products are considerably bigger.

Performance numbers of the XS1000 are quite alright (for its positioning). During reads it is able to reach 1 GB/s as soon as more than two threads are active. Writes run slightly slower, but are very close to 1 GB/s, too. Some competing 10 Gbps drives do end up faster, like the Crucial X8 and the HP P700. As expected, there is no DRAM cache for the mapping tables of the SSD, to optimize random writes. However, that isn't a dealbreaker, as it is an ultra-rare workload for a portable SSD.

The physical construction of the XS1000 is good, and it looks nice thanks to its all-black color theme. I guess it would be even better if the case were made out of metal, but given the competitive pricing, I can understand why Kingston went with plastic. Unlike some competing drives, you do get an activity indicator LED, which is great for a quick glance to find out whether an operation has completed yet. Temperatures were no problem on the XS1000—it gets just warm.

Sustained write speeds of the Kingston SSD aren't that impressive. With just 180 MB/s to fill the whole disk, it's slower than many of its competitors, but considerably faster than the Crucial X8. If you plan on copying hundreds of gigabytes per session without pause, then look elsewhere. If your working sets are smaller, up to 100 GB writes, or so, or you have pauses in transfers that give the drive room to breathe, the XS1000 will run much faster, reaching around 650 MB/s—the pseudo-SLC cache size is 120 GB, which is a reasonable size.

The Kingston XS1000 2 TB currently sells for $110, which is a competitive price for a 2 TB USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps portable SSD. The main competitors are Corsair EX100U ($110), Crucial X8 ($100), Samsung Z7 ($120), SanDisk Portable ($95) and SanDisk Portable Extreme ($120). Many of these drives use a similar hardware combo, with similar physical dimensions. If your computer supports USB 3.2 2x2 (20 Gbps), then you could improve transfer rates by spending a bit more. The Corsair EX100U is certainly interesting here, due to its low $110 price point. Another noteworthy alternative is the Sabrent Rocket Nano v2, which we reviewed not long ago, and the HP P900 (review coming next). I only wish Kingston offered a 4 TB version, which is something that's becoming more and more interesting due to the recent drop in NAND flash prices.