Introduction

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



Today, we bring you a review of the Kingston XS2000, which is the company's new flagship portable SSD. It utilizes the blazing-fast USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps interface, which doubles transfer rates over USB 3.2 Gen 2x1, aka USB 3.1 Gen 2. Many portable SSDs using USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 were bottlenecked by the USB interface speed, which has taking interface transfer rates to the next level make sense. At this time, only four AMD AM4 motherboards natively support the 20 Gbps USB interface; on Intel, there's about 70 motherboards, most using the Z590 chipset. For all our testing, we used a Gigabyte GC-USB 3.2 Gen2x2 PCI-Express x4 add-in card, so we can properly max out Kingston's new XS2000 portable SSD.

Internally, the XS2000 uses a Silicon Motion SM2320 controller, a new design with 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 XS2000 uses 3D TLC NAND flash, a DRAM cache chip is not installed.

We review the Kingston XS2000 in the 2 TB variant, which retails for $300, but it is also available in capacities of 500 GB and 1 TB. The warranty is set to five years for all these models.