Crucial X10 Pro 2TB Portable Solid State Drive

Model: Crucial X10 Pro 2TB Portable Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: Crucial
Provided By: Crucial

Crucial is a global brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory and flash storage manufacturers in the world. The company's product lineup includes award-winning solid state drives (SSDs) and computer memory upgrades (DRAM) for more than 50,000 systems. These products have been qualified and approved by major original equipment manufacturers and every single module has been rigorously tested at the component and module level. Each SSD also undergoes over a thousand hours of prerelease validation testing and hundreds of qualification tests to ensure optimal reliability and performance.

Crucial recently added two new portable SSDs to its Pro Series line of products. In addition to the more prosumer-oriented X9 Pro, the company released the X10 Pro. Designed for those who crave performance and portability, this palm-sized drive is made out of anodized aluminum, is water and dust resistant (IP55) and can withstand accidental drops of up to 7.5 feet. On the inside, the X10 Pro is powered by Silicon Motion's SM2320 controller and is available with up to 4TB of Micron's TLC NAND flash. The drive is also equipped with a USB 3.1 Gen 2x2 Type-C interface that can transfer data at speeds up to 2,100 MB/s, which is nearly twice that of its sibling, the X9 Pro. To top it all off, the X10 Pro works with Windows, Mac, Android, iPad, Linux, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles.

The X10 Pro is available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities. For this review, Crucial sent us the 2TB version of the drive which is capable of delivering up to 2,100 MB/s sequential read and 2,000 MB/s sequential write speeds.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the X10 Pro has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Crucial's new portable SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the X10 Pro have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we've come to expect from Crucial? Keep reading as we find out.

The X10 Pro comes in a small, silver and blue box. Along with a picture of the drive, the packaging advertises a number of its key features including its 2TB capacity, transfer speeds, dust and water resistance, and password protection. Inside the box, you'll find the X10 Pro, a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 USB-C cable and a small, multilingual quick-start guide.

Physical Features:

The X10 Pro is one of the smallest portable SSDs to come through the 'Labs. Measuring 65 x 50 x 10mm and weighing in at a mere 42g, the drive fits comfortably in the palm of a hand as well as your pocket.

Despite being compact and lightweight, the X10 Pro is very well constructed. The body of the drive is made out of anodized aluminum and is covered by a nice looking black finish. The X10 Pro also has a rubberized soft touch base as well as an integrated lanyard hole with a built-in activity light.

The X10 Pro's USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C port is located on the end of the drive opposite that of the lanyard hole. This interface transfers data and provides power for the device.

If you were to crack the X10 Pro open, you'd find Silicon Motion's SM2320 controller. Designed for use in portable SSDs, this DRAM-less controller solution features an on-chip USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface as well as four NAND flash channels. The SM2320 also includes Silicon Motion's NANDXtend ECC end-to-end data path protection and supports up to 4TB of capacity using the latest TLC and QLC NAND. In this case, the X10 Pro is equipped with Micron's 176L 3D TLC NAND flash.

The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 7900x CPU, Gigabyte B650E AORUS Master motherboard, 32GB (16GB x 2) of Corsair Vengeance 5200MT/s DDR5 memory, Samsung 990 Pro 2TB SSD, GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card and an ORICO PE20-1C USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 PCIe expansion card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 11. 

To test the performance of Crucial's X10 Pro portable SDD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark. For comparison, I've also included test results from the Crucial X9 Pro, Solidigm P44 Pro, Samsung 990 PRO, ADATA LEGEND 960, Crucial P3 Plus, SK hynix Platinum P41, Silicon Power XS70, WD_BLACK SN770, ADATA XPG ATOM 50, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade, Crucial P5 Plus, Plextor M10PY, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, WD_BLACK SN850, Silicon Power US70, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite, ADATA Elite SE880, Kingston XS2000, ADATA XPG ATOM 30, Samsung 980, Silicon-Power UD70, Crucial P2, SK hynix Gold P31 and Crucial P5.

As I mentioned earlier, the X10 Pro uses Silicon Motion's SM2320 controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.

CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4:

First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential and random read and write speeds. For this test, we're using the peak and real world profiles.

According to Crucial, the X10 Pro is capable of reading at 2,100 MB/s and writing at 2,000 MB/s when plugged into a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port. While the drive performed well, it came up a bit short of this number in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.

As you'd expect, the X10 Pro wasn't as fast when tested with the "real world" profile which uses a single thread and a much lower queue depth. Nevertheless, it was still able to read at 1929 MB/s and write at more than 1740 MB/s.

ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01:

I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the X10 Pro's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 512B to 64 MB and the total length set to 256MB.

Crucial X10 Pro 2TB

Kingston XS2000 1TB

When tested with ATTO, the X10 Pro's read speeds topped out at about 1.93 GB/s and its write speeds at 1.71 GB/s.

AS SSD:

AS SSD is a benchmark designed specifically for solid state drives. The application contains five synthetic tests which are used to determine the sequential and random read and write performance of a drive.

Crucial X10 Pro 2TB

Kingston XS2000 1TB

AS SSD also includes a copy benchmark. This test copies an ISO (two large files), program (many small files) and game (small and large files), returning the speed and duration of each.

Crucial X10 Pro 2TB

Kingston XS2000 1TB

HD Tune Pro 5.75:

Next, I ran a series of tests using HD Tune Pro. This hard disk utility measures a drive's performance by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its access time, burst rate and CPU usage. For this review, I'm also going to use it to benchmark the X10 Pro's random read and write speeds, random access times and the number of operations per second.

Crucial X10 Pro 2TB - Read Benchmark

Kingston XS2000 1TB - Read Benchmark

Crucial X10 Pro 2TB - Write Benchmark

Kingston XS2000 1TB - Write Benchmark

The X10 Pro performed relatively well when benchmarked with HD Tune. The drive had average read and write speeds of 1845.1 MB/s and 1636.9 MB/s, respectively.

Crucial X10 Pro 2TB - Random Access Read

Kingston XS2000 1TB - Random Access Read

Crucial X10 Pro 2TB - Random Access Write

Kingston XS2000 1TB - Random Access Writee

When writing 4KB blocks, the X10 Pro reached 22,218 IOPS and had an average speed of 86.792 MB/s. The drive was slightly faster when reading, reaching 22,380 IOPS with an average speed of 87.425 MB/s.

Anvil's Storage Utilities:

Anvil's Storage Utilities is another benchmark designed with SSDs in mind. The standard storage benchmark measures a drive's performance by testing its transfer speeds, access times and IOPS.

Iometer:

Lastly, I ran a series of tests using Iometer. This tool can be configured to benchmark a number of things. In this case, I used it to measure the X10 Pro's read and write speeds and the number of operations per second. The tests were run using random bytes and a queue depth of 3.

The X10 Pro's performance was very similar to what we saw in our other tests. The drive was able to read at 1973.51 MB/s and write at 1700.28 MB/s.

The X10 Pro wasn't one of the faster drives we've tested when it came to random reads and writes. In our tests, the drive was able to read at 109.06 MB/s and write at 333.28 MB/s.

Crucial really doesn't say what the X10 Pro is capable of in regards to IOPS. In our tests, the drive reached 27,920 random read IOPS and 85,319 random write IOPS. Increasing the queue depth had little impact on the X10 Pro's random write performance. However, with four threads and the queue depth set to 32, the drive was able to reach 69,444 random read IOPS.

Vantage PCMark 8 - Storage Test:

PCMark 8 is a complete benchmark for Windows. It includes five benchmark tests, each designed around a specific scenario. The storage benchmark measures drive performance using real-world traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games.

PCMark 10 - Full System Drive Benchmark:

PCMark 10's Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. This benchmark produces an overall score as a measure of drive performance. Comparing devices is as simple as comparing scores. The tests also measure and report the bandwidth and average access time performance for the drive.

Crucial's new X10 Pro portable SSD is proof that good things do come in small packages. Constructed out of anodized aluminum, this lightweight, pocket-sized drive not only looks great, it's durable enough to handle whatever life throws at it. The X10 Pro is both water and dust proof and can survive drops up to 7.5'. On the inside, the X10 Pro is also powered by Silicon Motion's SM2320 controller and is available with up 4TB of Micron's TLC NAND flash for the storage of thousands of photos, files and videos. Combine this with a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C interface and you have a portable SSD that's capable of some pretty impressive performance. In our sequential read and write tests, the X10 Pro was able to read at speeds as high as 2,063 MB/s and write at speeds in excess of 1,840 MB/s.

The Crucial X10 Pro is available now in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities.  Prices on Amazon.com currently range from $108 up to $261, with the 2TB version reviewed here retailing for about $130.

Highs:

• Available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities
• Compact, pocket-sized design
• Silicon Motion SM2320 controller
• Equipped with Micron TLC NAND
• USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C interface
• Excellent sequential read and write speeds
• Works with Windows, Mac, Android, iPad, Linux, PlayStation and Xbox
• Reasonably priced
• Water and dust proof (IP55)
• Password protection and 256‐bit AES hardware encryption
• 5 year warranty

Lows:

• Mediocre random read and write performance