Review Verdict: Kingston’s fast, tiny XS1000R Portable SSD is a great storage medium that photographers and videographers will love in the Philippines. However, its lack of ruggedization might be a literal deal breaker for some.
Pros
- Tiny and light
- Solid performance
- 5-year warranty
Cons
- No USB-C to USB-C straight connection
- No hardware-based encryption
- No ruggedization
If you’re someone like us who usually deals with large files for videos and photos, you’ve probably run out of storage space in your PC drive at one time or another. There are many ways to mitigate this ranging from cheap and DIY (buying an SSD and an enclosure and calling it a day) to expensive and boutique (buying a NAS and the accompanying hard drives). There’s a middle ground though–you can always go out and grab an off-the-shelf portable SSD drive like the Kingston XS1000R.
Kingston XS1000R SSD Review Philippines: Design and Features
There isn’t much to talk about with the design of the Kingston XS1000R, as it’s essentially the red version of their XS1000, which was a pretty solid drive in its own right.
The XS1000R has a USB 3.2 Gen 2 plug, and Kingston has thrown in a USB-C to USB-A adapter instead of just stuffing the packaging with two cables.
Internally, the drive uses a Silicon Motion SM2320 controller and lacks AES 256-bit encryption and a DRAM cache–which makes it a touch slower when it comes to writing duties. It also only comes in two varieties–1TB and 2TB, which means you’ll have to go with the XS2000 if you need more storage space.
Kingston XS1000R SSD Review Philippines: Performance
Plugging the XS1000R in the Type-C port of our gaming rig (ROG Maximus Z790 Hero), we’re getting near-advertised performance out of the drive. CrystalDisk shows read and write speeds that are within the range of what Kingston advertises.
If you’re someone who carries around high-value data with you or is an HVT like a C-suite exec or celebrity, you probably won’t like the fact that the XS1000R doesn’t have hardware encryption, but for everyone else, that’s not that big of a deal-breaker.
Kingston XS1000R Review Philippines: Wrap-up and Conclusions
This is essentially the same drive as we reviewed a few months ago, just in a new colorway and with an included adapter. And like we said in that review, this is a great option if you’re looking for a small drive that has big storage and quick read and write speeds. It’s great value especially if you need a portable drive to transfer large amounts of files from one location to another.
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Kingston XS1000R Review Philippines: Price
The XS1000R is priced at Php 4,599 for the 1TB model and Php 7,599 for the 2TB model. You can purchase them at Kingston’s official Lazada store.
