Corsair EX100U 2TB External SSD Review

To test real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.

We use the following folder/file types:

• 100GB data file.
• 60GB iso image.
• 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
• 50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
• 21GB 8K Movie demos.
• 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
• 11GB 4K Raw Movie Clips (8 MP4V files).
• 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of png, raw and jpeg images).
• 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
• 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
• Blu-ray movie.

Transferring the data to and from a 6Gb/s SATA drive saw the EX100U average 538MB/s when writing the six largest files to the drive and 453MB/s when reading the data back again.

To get a true measure of the speed of the  USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 interface we ran the same transfer tests but to and from a 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus NVMe drive:

Switching over to reading and writing the data from the EX100U to an NVMe SSD saw, as you might expect, transfer speeds rocket and access times drop. The fastest write speed, 1,570MB/s, came when transferring the 5GB image while the fastest read speed came when reading the contents of the AutoCAD folder at 1,602MB/s.

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