Crucial X10 USB C SSD Review – TWICE AS FAST!

This is Crucial’s new X10 USB C SSD, and it is twice as fast as most USB C SSDs on the market! How? Well that’s pretty simple, they are finally utilising the USB C 20 Gbps connection, rather than the 10 Gbps connection basically every drive available right now uses. To give it it’s full, and stupid, name, it’s USB 3.2 Gen 2×2. Ridiculous. Anyway, let’s have a quick look at this, then check out the performance. It’s important to note that this isn’t the same as the now two year old Crucial X10 Pro – this ‘non-pro’ is in this rather fetching blue, albeit it is the same shape, being literally palm-sized, not much thicker than two coins stacked together, and sporting just a USB C port on one side and a little loop for a lanyard on a corner. You of course have the Crucial and Micron logos on the front – the magic of this this over say a Sabrent drive is that Micron actually makes the NAND flash that goes into their drives, so in theory you’re buying the creme of the crop, the most reliable, the best performing stuff. One thing to note here is that this is weather resistant – specifically IP65 rated, meaning it can withstand getting at least a little wet without issue. Maybe don’t take it swimming – despite what the fetching colour might suggest – but I don’t know spilling your coffee on it is fine. Oh and in the box you get just the drive and a pretty short USB C to C cable.

So that’s the drive, now let’s look at the performance. Crucial claims up to 2.1GB/s reads, and it seems we’re close enough on that front with 1.976GB/s in Crystal Disk Mark with a queue depth of 8 and one thread, and 1.8GB/s on writes, which is essentially twice as fast as the USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) Crucial X8. I included a slower Gen 4 M.2 SSD here just as a point of comparison. With just one thread you’ll get a touch less performance, about 1.7GB/s and 1.55GB/s reads and writes respectively, although that’s to be expected especially as the slower X8 shows the same sort of drop. Interestingly, with a random 4K block and a queue depth of 32 you see there’s actually no raw performance difference between the X8 and X10. This shows that this is very similar NAND, but with a higher maximum bandwidth on the controller, and that’s about it. The same goes for a queue depth of one, where interestingly the X8 actually offers slightly better read performance – only 33MB/s versus 25MB/s, but still. 

Using AS SSD always yields lower results, even in sequential testing, hence the peak of 1.8GB/s on reads and 1.67GB/s on writes from this X10, and the 820 and 800 MB/s from the X8. Luckily I do have some valid Gen 3 SSD results to compare to here, and the X10 is actually getting kinda close. Like it’s still a gigabyte off from the Gen 3 drives on reads, but considering this is an external USB drive, that’s not bad! With a random 4K block size and a single thread you’ll find, much like with Crystal Disk Mark, that the two USB drives are functionally tied. In fact, they are exactly tied on writes at 67.3MB/s exactly, with only the reads tie-breaking (in the older X8’s favour no less). With 64 threads you do get more performance, although again the results between the USB SSDs are functionally tied, with the X10 eking out a 13MB/s advantage on writes, but the X8 getting that back and then some with the reads. The only difference here is the top end bandwidth. 

Looking at ATTO Disk Benchmark, you can see that quite clearly. For smaller blocks – anything smaller than 16 or 32 KB – you’re going to get identical performance on an X8 as an X10, it’s only when the higher bandwidth kicks in (quite suddenly) around 16 and 32 KB blocks do you get a marked improvement in performance, right around 2GB/s, up from 1GB/s on the X8. I do find it interesting the curves are much smoother on these external drives compared to internal M.2 drives – even Gen 3 drives. 

As for real world file transfers, that sat at around 1GB/s on the X10 (versus around 660MB/s on the X8), which isn’t as fast as I was expecting to be honest. The drive it’s copying from can do 4GB/s no problem, and the synthetic tools were able to sort it no problem, but actually copying files… That’s on the slower side. At least it’s nearly twice as fast as the X8 here too. I did also run my duplication stress test, which stresses reads and writes simultaneously, and lets us see how big the SLC cache is, and for this drive you’ll get full performance for the first 400GB or so of non-stop writing (at least on this 2TB drive). The revert rate is around 175MB/s for this test, which to be fair is still pretty fast for an external USB SSD like this. Spreading the writing out should help a bit, and this isn’t quite the same as just writing to the drive, 

On the whole then, if you liked the X8 or X9, you’ll like this just a little bit more. Depending on the scenario you can indeed get up to twice the performance out of this thing, and if that’s useful to you, have at it. This does come at a price premium compared to the very similar X9 – even looking at MSRP it looks like the X9 is £130 for this 2TB size, versus £160 for this X10. The X10 Pro (which is also a Gen2x2 drive by the way) is only £10 more for the same size. Still, if you’d prefer the fetching blue, and want to save a tenner, this X10 is a nice shout. If you don’t feel like you need the extra speed, saving – at the time of filming – £55 for the same size drive, the X9 is a great shout. Personally, I don’t know that I’d be willing to spend functionally double to get speed boost, although generally speaking I don’t use external drives like this all that often, so I’m not exactly the target market. If you do, does this sort of speed boost warrant the extra cost? Please do let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear your thoughts!