ACCESSORIES
Promising impressive speed and capacity, could this be a must for photos and video? Richard Sibley finds out
● £194.86 ● www.kingston.com
Construction The drive is made from metal and plastic and comes with a protective rubber sleeve. As it is an SSD, there are no fragile moving parts.
Kingston’s XS2000 range of SSD drives are genuinely pocket-sized storage devices that offer incredible speeds to photographers and filmmaking wishing to work on the move. Available in four capacities, 512MB, 1TB, 2TB and an impressive 4TB, the pricing ranges from £62.87 to £369.17 offering competitive value for an SSD of this specification. I tried the 2TB drive, which should offer enough storage space for most photographers to back up a significant amount of their photo or video projects for use on the move.
Kingston quotes the drive as having a maximum potential speed of 2,000MB/s for both read and write, which is impressive, but it does come with a caveat. To obtain the fastest speeds, you must have a computer that states explicitly it uses USB 3.2 Gen. 2x2. Many computers have bypassed USB 3.2 2x2 and will be either the older USB 3.2 or the newer USB 4, which is faster but not compatible with USB 3.2 Gen. 2x2. So the XS2000 will work, but not to its full potential. I tried it with my Macbook Air M1, which is USB 3.2 Gen 2, so the drive has a theoretical maximum of 1,200MB/s. Using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, I achieved a read speed of 673MB/s and a write speed of 561MB/s. Even at these speeds, the software showed I could use the drive to record up to 12K raw video footage at 24fps.
On my PC, I used CrystalDiskMark 7 on the motherboard’s USB 3.2 port and achieved a read speed of 944MB/S and a write speed of 1035MB/s. I added USB 3.2 Gen. 2x2 card via a PCI port on my motherboard, specifically for this review, and got a read speed of 1588MB/s and a write speed of 1461MB/s – both of which are impressively fast. It’s worth noting that results will vary depending on your computer’s specificat
