Kingston XS1000 external SSD hands-on review: Basic drive that fits almost anywhere

The sequential read and write speeds, in particular, are fairly close to the range promised by Kingston. On a compatible USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, we measured a read speed of 980 MB/s and a write speed of 900 MB/s using AS SSD. This is not even 10% lower than what the manufacturer claims. We may be able to achieve better figures using other hardware and another test tool, but the results we obtained are completely fine as they are.  

The speeds at which the device transfers large amounts of data are much more interesting and meaningful. H2testw is a tool that can effectively simulate such a scenario. The XS1000 took precisely 6:00 minutes to write 100 GB of test data, which translates to exactly 278 MB/s. This indicates that a file of this magnitude can be moved within this amount of time. We even managed to obtain a speed of 149 MB/s when writing to the entire disk. The read and verify process also ran consistently at over 700 MB/s.

Although the XS1000 isn’t going win any awards with those results, it remains still a solid mid-tier offering. Less expensive external SSDs (especially those that only support up to USB 3.0) quite often don’t even come close to 100 MB/s during realistic write processes. The more expensive PNY Elite X-Pro, which we’ve also reviewed, can reach approximately double the write speed of the Kingston XS1000.

We used Shadow of the Tomb Raider to test whether games can run off the SSD. The game is still demanding enough to make a modern gaming notebook with average hardware break a sweat. Two test runs were conducted for each scenario: one at the lowest settings and another with all the available details and extras enabled.

It didn’t make any difference whether the game was running off an internal PCIe 4.0 SSD with a max transfer rate of 4,500 MB/s or the Kingston XS1000 connected to an outdated USB 3.0 port running at 500 MB/s. The built-in benchmark consistently gave us exactly the same results. Performance was even 1 FPS higher over USB 3.0, but this definitely falls within normal range of variability.

This outcome isn’t surprising because the XS1000’s read and write performance is comparable to that of a high-end SATA SSD. Generally speaking, this type of drive is good enough for running modern games without any noticeable or measurable constraints. Though it's unlikely, we of course can’t completely rule out the possibility that a few specific games with special requirements may suffer from very minor hits to their performance.