Crucial X10 Pro 2TB External SSD

Crucial's X10 Pro is, at the time of writing, the company's flagship external SSD drive. The X range of external drives is made of four models; the X8, Crucial's first external SSD, designed for consumer workloads, the X6, the slowest drive in the range which offers a balance of value, capacity and performance and the two new Pro drives, and then the X9 and X10 which have been designed with content creators in mind.

The X10 Pro is the fastest Crucial external SSD to date, rated at up to 2,100MB/s and 2,000MB/s for read and writes respectively. As with the X9 the drive uses a Silicon Motion SM2320 controller but this time with the interface running at its full USB 3.2 Gen2 x 2 (20Gbps) speed. The controller looks after packages of Micron's own B47R 176-Layer 3D TLC NAND.

The combination of a controller that doesn't need a bridging chip and denser NAND means that the drive is a wee little thing. Measuring 65 x 50 x 10mm and weighing in at just 38g it's around half the size of the X8 for the same given capacity.

Built with an anodised aluminium chassis with a rubber base, Crucial states that the x10 Pro can survive a 2m drop on a carpeted floor without damaging the data stored on the SSD, which is a bit of a no-brainer, as if it couldn't it would be pretty alarming. The drive carries an IP55 rating for water and dust resistance. But a word to the wise, the IP55 rating means that although the drive has limited protection from water, it's not waterproof.

Crucial rate the drive as up to 2,100MB/s for reads and up to 2,000MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO and ASSSD benchmarks to test the drive we couldn't reach those official maximums with the best read/write scores for those two benchmarks coming from ATTO at 1,940MB/s and 1,739MB/s for reads and writes respectively.

Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we saw read test results much closer to the official figures with a best read result of 2,072MB/s (Peak Performance profile test, QD8 T1) while the best write result of 1,854MB/s came from the default test, again with QD8 T1 settings.

With our real-life file transfers we saw read performance go over the 2GB/s mark in five out of the fourteen tests, while another seven topped the 1GB/s mark, the fastest being the 2,076MB/s for the 5GB image transfer. Incidentally the X9 Pro produced a figure of 1,027MB/s for the same file transfer. When it came to writes, ten of the fourteen tests topped 1GB/s, the fastest being the 1,457MB/s for the Windows 11 ISO transfer. This figure is 429MB/s faster than the same transfer using the X9 Pro.

Pre-loaded on the drive are links to various useful utilities: Acronis True Image For Crucial (for backups), Mylio Photos (photo management) and although there is a link for Hedge Transfer software (file transfers), in our case, it didn't seem to be working. At the time of writing when you buy and register an X10 Pro you get a one-month complimentary Adobe® Creative Cloud All Apps plan.

We found the 2TB version of the X10 Pro for sale directly from Crucial UK for £179.99 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• Fast performance.
• Design.

Cons

• Couldn't quite hit the official maximum speeds in testing.
• Need a USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 port to get the best performance out of it.

KitGuru says: Never mind pocket-sized, Crucial's latest flagship external SSD drive is so small you might well lose it in a pocket. The X10 Pro offers plenty of capacity despite its small format and thanks to its interface, it's no slouch.

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