Corsair EX100U portable SSD review: Lags behind the competition

Price When Reviewed

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

Best Prices Today: Corsair EX100U USB 20Gbps SSD

Corsair’s small, handsomely designed EX100U is a 20Gbps SSD, nonetheless, its general efficiency falls someplace between what you’d count on 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 accessible 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 huge, by 0.42-inches skinny and a mere 0.7 ounces of heft. Put one other means, it’s a nice-looking unit that may nearly disappear in your pocket.

The unit ships with each Type-C to Type-C and Type-A to Type-C cables. Corsair offers its SSD Toolbox software program (a separate obtain), which is able to present drive data 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 attempting to put in writing exabytes of knowledge to the drive.

How a lot is the Corsair EX100U?

To be trustworthy, 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 out there 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 sluggish. 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 exams. In fact, it wasn’t even notably shut.

The 4K switch exams under had been the EX100U’s one second to shine. If you had been to run an working system off this drive, it could 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 sooner 20Gbps USB 3.2×2 SSDs accessible.

Note that the poor 48GB single-file write time was because of the 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 identical exhaustion of cache occurred within the 450GB write, which dropped to round 300MBps after writing a mere 35GB of knowledge. At least right here, the EX100U outpaced the XS2000 due to a barely sooner native NAND write velocity. 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 in relation to efficiency. Indeed, it is likely to be higher to consider it as a souped-up 10Gbps drive — if you’ll find it as a value 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 usually required, however now and again it helps.

Should I purchase the Corsair EX100U?

With pricing because it was on the time of this overview, the Corsair EX100U is just not of our quick checklist of bargains at the moment. That mentioned, it’s considered one of our favourite merchandise in look. If you discover it at heavy low cost someplace, it’s high-quality for mild workloads, — certainly, you may take into account it a four-star drive when priced decrease.

How we take a look at

Drive exams at the moment 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 whole). Intel built-in graphics are used. The 48GB switch exams make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk taking over 58GB of the 64GB whole reminiscence. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which additionally accommodates 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 differ with capability attributable to extra or fewer chips to learn/write throughout and the quantity of NAND accessible for secondary caching (writing TLC/QLC as SLC). Vendors additionally sometimes swap elements. If you ever discover a big discrepancy between the efficiency you expertise and that which we report (techniques being roughly equal), by all means—tell us.