INTRODUCTION

   From the very first USB (Universal Serial Bus) standards (1.0/1.1) with speeds not even surpassing 13-14MB/s to USB 2.0 with speeds rarely ever going over 40-45MB/s, USB 3.0/3.1/3.2 Gen 1 stretching all the way to 500MB/s and 3.1/3.2 Gen 2 which can even reach 1000MB/s, extremal portable drives have certainly come a long way over the past 3 decades. USB 4.0 is now upon us and even though it has a theoretical maximum speed of 4000MB/s (Gen 3x2 - just like Thunderbolt 4 since they are almost identical) it seems that the market is not quite ready for it. As a matter of fact, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (2000MB/s max) seems to be the "hottest" standard right now and since Kingston recently released their XS2000 line of portable SSDs i decided to take a look for myself and see what you can really expect from these blazing fast drives.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America. For more information, please call +44 (0)1932 738888 or visit www.kingston.com

   The XS2000 by Kingston is a tiny Portable SSD made out of plastic, rubber and metal (shockproof and water and dust resistant) currently available in 500GB/1TB/2TB capacities. Although tiny this particular portable SSD is not only the fastest currently in the entire Kingston lineup but it's also amongst the fastest ones in the market right now thanks to the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 standard which allows it to reach read & write speeds (sequential) of up to 2000MB/s. To achieve this Kingston used the latest quad-channel (32 CEs) SM2320 NAND flash controller by Silicon Motion which packs their NANDXtend ECC end-to-end data path protection but even though it also supports AES 256-bit encryption for full compliance with the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Opal specification the XS2000 doesn't have that specific feature. Now since this is the very first controller of its kind i do expect improvements later on (both hardware and firmware) but for now let's see what the latest XS2000 1TB Portable SSD by Kingston is all about.