Price When Reviewed

1TB: $95 I 2TB: $160 I 4TB: $395

Best Prices Today: Corsair EX100U USB 20Gbps SSD

$99.99

Corsair’s small, handsomely designed EX100U is a 20Gbps SSD, nonetheless, its general efficiency falls someplace between what you’d anticipate from a 10Gbps and a 20Gbps SSD. But even towards many 10Gbps SSDs, the EX100U proved slothful by comparability throughout lengthy writes.

Further studying: See our roundup of the best external drives to study competitors.

What are the Corsair EX100U’s options?

The EX100U is a 20Gbps, exterior USB 3.2×2 SSD obtainable in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. It’s good-looking and svelte to the tune of barely over 3-inches lengthy, by 1.45-inches vast, by 0.42-inches skinny and a mere 0.7 ounces of heft. Put one other approach, it’s a nice-looking unit that can just about disappear in your pocket.

The unit ships with each Type-C to Type-C and Type-A to Type-C cables. Corsair supplies its SSD Toolbox software program (a separate obtain), which is able to present drive info and replace the firmware when relevant.

A 3-year restricted guarantee is offered for the EX100U, with the restrict little doubt being bodily abuse and making an attempt to put in writing exabytes of information to the drive.

How a lot is the Corsair EX100U?

To be sincere, I used to be anticipating the EX100U to be significantly cheaper than the competitors attributable to its lesser efficiency, which I describe under. But that’s not the case. The 1TB model is obtainable for $95, the 2TB for $160, and the 4TB for $395 on the time of this writing.

That’s aggressive per gigabyte of capability, however not when it comes to gigabytes per second.

How quick is the Corsair EX100U?

If this had been 5 years in the past, I’d be raving concerning the 2TB EX100U I examined. It beats the heck out of 5Gbps USB drives and is quicker than 10Gbps drives, besides throughout lengthy writes. For a USB 3.2×2 SSD, nonetheless, it’s gradual. Oddly, it beat a lot of the competitors in 4K efficiency, however lagged considerably in sequential transfers.

Take, for instance, the EX100U’s last-place efficiency (amongst all 20Gbps SSDs) in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sequential switch checks. In fact, it wasn’t even significantly shut.

The 4K switch checks under had been the EX100U’s one second to shine. If you had been to run an working system off this drive, it will really feel fairly darn sprightly.

The older Kingston XS2000 was the closest match to the EX100U’s not-so-speedy 48GB real-world transfers, therefore its presence on the charts. But you may see from the Samsung T9 and Crucial X10 that there are far quicker 20Gbps USB 3.2×2 SSDs obtainable.

Note that the poor 48GB single-file write time was as a result of drive operating out of secondary cache earlier than ending — one thing we’ve by no means seen earlier than with a 2TB SSD. Normally, this gained’t happen till the 450GB write — even with 1TB drives with much less NAND to allot for secondary cache duties.

The similar exhaustion of cache occurred within the 450GB write, which dropped to round 300MBps after writing a mere 35GB of information. At least right here, the EX100U outpaced the XS2000 due to a barely quicker native NAND write pace. Note that many 10Gbps SSDs end this take a look at in half the time or much less.

The early slowdown is proven in graphic element under.

Obviously, the EX100U leaves one thing to be desired relating to efficiency. Indeed, it is perhaps higher to consider it as a souped-up 10Gbps drive — if you’ll find it as a worth commensurate with 10Gbps.

Note that I needed to enter disk supervisor and select “Better performance” underneath Properties/Policies to get these numbers. Performance was noticeably worse on the default “Quick removal” setting. This change isn’t typically required, however from time to time it helps.

Should I purchase the Corsair EX100U?

With pricing because it was on the time of this assessment, the Corsair EX100U will not be of our quick checklist of bargains presently. That stated, it’s considered one of our favourite merchandise in look. If you discover it at heavy low cost someplace, it’s nice for gentle workloads, — certainly, you may take into account it a four-star drive when priced decrease.

How we take a look at

Drive checks at present make the most of Windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit operating on an X790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of reminiscence complete). Intel built-in graphics are used. The 48GB switch checks make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk taking on 58GB of the 64GB complete reminiscence. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which additionally comprises the working system.

Each take a look at is carried out on a newly NTFS-formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Note that as any drive fills up, efficiency will lower attributable to much less NAND for secondary caching, and different components.

The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we had been shipped in addition to the capability examined. SSD efficiency can range with capability attributable to extra or fewer chips to learn/write throughout and the quantity of NAND obtainable for secondary caching (writing TLC/QLC as SLC). Vendors additionally often swap elements. If you ever discover a big discrepancy between the efficiency you expertise and that which we report (programs being roughly equal), by all means—tell us.