Portable solid state drive
Kingston XS2000 External SSD
Next-gen external USB 3.2 2x2 storage goes mainstream with Ganesh T S at the testing station.
IN BRIEF
A next-gen external USB flash drive from storage expert Kingston. It makes use of the latest Silicon Motion SM2320 controller, which enables maximum throughput on a USB 3.2 Gen 2 bus in a tiny 7x3.2x1.3cm IP55 case.
The advent of high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20Gbps) along with Thunderbolt 3 (up to 40Gbps) have enabled significant improvements in the performance of portable SSDs.
The higher-speed (20Gbps+) variants had traditionally been restricted to premium devices. Additionally, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 was turning out to be an odd standard, because the new USB 4.0 standard opted to support only features of USB 3.2 Gen 2 from a backwards compatibility perspective. On both the host and device side, ASMedia was the only silicon vendor for more than a year. However, the introduction of more host platforms (Intel’s latest 600 chipset) with native support for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 and the appearance of native 20Gbps USB flash drive (UFD) controllers from Phison and Silicon Motion have enabled the 20Gbps standard to gain more traction.