Corsair EX100U transportable SSD evaluate: Lags unhurried the competition

Payment When Reviewed

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

Handiest Costs Nowadays: Corsair EX100U USB 20Gbps SSD

Corsair’s exiguous, handsomely designed EX100U is a 20Gbps SSD, on the assorted hand, its total performance falls somewhere between what you’d query from a 10Gbps and a 20Gbps SSD. However even in opposition to many 10Gbps SSDs, the EX100U proved sluggish by comparability throughout lengthy writes.

Extra studying: Look our roundup of the handiest external drives to examine competition.

What are the Corsair EX100Usafeatures?

The EX100U is a 20Gbps, external USB 3.2×2 SSD on hand in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. It’s handsome and svelte to the tune of a puny bit over 3-inches lengthy, by 1.45-inches huge, by 0.42-inches thin and a mere 0.7 ounces of heft. Build one other diagram, it’s a nice-looking out unit that can nearly depart to your pocket.

The unit ships with each and every Form-C to Form-C and Form-A to Form-C cables. Corsair affords its SSD Toolbox tool (a separate web), which can present force data and change the firmware when acceptable.

A three-year restricted guarantee is equipped for the EX100U, with the restrict no query being bodily abuse and looking out to write exabytes of data to the force.

How remarkable is the Corsair EX100U?

To be beautiful, I became as soon as looking out ahead to the EX100U to be severely much less dear than the competition due to its lesser performance, which I listing below. However that is no longer the case. The 1TB version is on hand for $95, the 2TB for $160, and the 4TB for $395 on the time of this writing.

That’s aggressive per gigabyte of capacity, however no longer by gigabytes per 2nd.

How rapidly is the Corsair EX100U?

If this had been five years ago, I’d be raving about the 2TB EX100U I tested. It beats the heck out of 5Gbps USB drives and is sooner than 10Gbps drives, excluding throughout lengthy writes. For a USB 3.2×2 SSD, on the assorted hand, it’s slow. Oddly, it beat many of the competition in 4K performance, however lagged vastly in sequential transfers.

Take, to illustrate, the EX100Usalast-insist performance (amongst all 20Gbps SSDs) in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sequential switch tests. In actual fact, it wasn’t even particularly stop.

The 4K switch tests below had been the EX100Usaone 2nd to shine. In the event you had been to speed an working machine off this force, it could perhaps feel rather darn sprightly.

The older Kingston XS2000 became as soon as the closest match to the EX100Usanot-so-rapidly 48GB loyal-world transfers, hence its presence on the charts. However that you can eye from the Samsung T9 and Fundamental X10 that there are a ways faster 20Gbps USB 3.2×2 SSDs on hand.

Present that the sad 48GB single-file write time became as soon as as a result of force running out of secondary cache prior to ending — one thing we’ve never seen prior to with a 2TB SSD. Assuredly, this received’t occur except the 450GB write — even with 1TB drives with much less NAND to allot for secondary cache tasks.

The a linked exhaustion of cache occurred in the 450GB write, which dropped to around 300MBps after writing a mere 35GB of data. No longer much less than right here, the EX100U outpaced the XS2000 thanks to a a puny bit faster native NAND write slide. Present that many 10Gbps SSDs stop this take a look at in half the time or much less.

The early slowdown is shown in graphic component below.

Clearly, the EX100U leaves one thing to be desired with regards to performance. Indeed, it is potentially better to grasp of it as a souped-up 10Gbps force — if you happen to can receive it as a imprint commensurate with 10Gbps.

Present that I needed to enter disk manager and capture “Greater performance” below Properties/Insurance policies to catch these numbers. Performance became as soon as noticeably worse on the default “Like a flash removal” atmosphere. This commerce isn’t in total required, however every so regularly it helps.

Must I have interaction the Corsair EX100U?

With pricing as it became as soon as on the time of this evaluate, the Corsair EX100U is no longer of our short list of bargains at the present. That said, it’s one of our well-liked merchandise in appearance. In the event you receive it at heavy nick imprint somewhere, it’s sexy for light workloads, — certainly, that you can bewitch into consideration it a four-star force when priced lower.

How we take a look at

Power tests at the moment use Windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit running on an X790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of memory total). Intel constructed-in graphics are ragged. The 48GB switch tests use an ImDisk RAM disk taking on 58GB of the 64GB total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which also contains the working machine.

Each and every take a look at is performed on a newly NTFS-formatted and TRIM’d force so the outcomes are optimum. Present that as any force fills up, performance will decrease due to much less NAND for secondary caching, and other components.

The performance numbers shown apply handiest to the force we had been shipped moreover to the capacity tested. SSD performance can range with capacity due to extra or fewer chips to read/write throughout and the amount of NAND on hand for secondary caching (writing TLC/QLC as SLC). Distributors also every so regularly swap substances. In the event you ever leer a enormous discrepancy between the performance you ride and that which we file (programs being roughly equal), by all diagram—allow us to perceive.