PORTABLE SOLID-STATE DRIVE | From £61 from Amazon www.snipca.com/47685
Speed reader
Many of us are looking for affordable, compact external storage. But until the price of 2TB USB sticks drop to a reasonable level, we’re stuck with external SSDs. Although you can’t plug this Kingston XS1000 directly into a USB port without a cable, its size (just 70mm in length), weight (28.7g) and short cable make it almost as portable as a USB stick.
The XS1000 is available in capacities of 1TB (£63 from www.snipca.com/47685) or 2TB (£114 from www.snipca.com/47686), so is slightly better value in its larger format if you’re likely to need that amount of storage. It comes with a generous five-year warranty.
The design is a small black rectangular box with one USB-C port. It comes with a USB-C-to-USB 3.0 cable, so if you need to connect it to another USB-C device you’ll have to provide your own cable.
The USB-C connection is the Gen 2 type, which is common on laptops. At its fastest, Kingston says it can reach read speeds of 1,050MB/s and write speeds of 1,000MB/s. Our tests corroborated this – more or less – with a read performance of 1,054MB/s but a marginally slower write speed of 970MB/s. If you’re looking for a speedy way of backing up your PC’s hard drive, this will do the job admirably.
What you don’t get is much in the way of additional software. There is a tool that will keep an eye on the health of the drive, which is handy, b
