Corsair EX100U 2TB Review: Portable Storage Drive

The Corsair EX100U is a very compact external SSD that sets out to be light, pocketable and affordable, and this review weighs how well it delivers on that brief. It is based on the published test of the 2TB model, not on a hands-on trial of our own.

Out of its tiny box, the EX100U looks more like Kingston's product than Sabrent's. It shares the same pairing of silver-grey for the top and bottom faces with black around the edges and short sides, and it keeps the ultra-flat, slab-like form, though it turns out a little longer, a little wider and a little thinner than the competition: roughly 79 mm long, 37 mm wide and 11 mm thick, against the 70 x 32.5 x 13.5 dimensions of Kingston's XS2000 and the far larger 105 x 45 x 14 body of Sabrent's drive.

More interestingly, the Corsair is a touch lighter than its direct rival at exactly 22 g versus 29 g for the XS2000. Sabrent's XTRM-Q cannot compete on this front at all, its 129 g being a direct consequence of the drive's metal structure. Corsair, like Kingston, has fallen back on a plastic chassis to keep both cost and weight to a minimum. The trade-off is that neither can rely on that chassis to dissipate heat from the components.

Cheaper than the Kingston and Sabrent drives, the EX100U has to do without any accessory beyond two small USB cables. The SSD carries a single USB-C port, and those cables let you connect it to machines fitted with either a USB-A or a USB-C socket. It is worth stressing that, like its rivals, Corsair advises plugging the drive into a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port to enjoy the best throughput and reach the 1.6/1.5 GB/s in reads and writes the maker quotes.

There is no rubber sleeve of the sort Kingston and Sabrent supply; that handy accessory protects the casing against knocks at the cost of a little extra bulk. It is not indispensable, but its absence here is a shame. The chassis does at least include a slot for a lanyard, though Corsair does not actually provide one. Finally, the EX100U comes in three capacities — 1TB, 2TB (the review sample) and 4TB — built on 3D NAND with, in each case, a Phison PS2251-18 controller but no DRAM chip for caching.

To draw the best performance the EX100U really must be connected over USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. Corsair is nonetheless less ambitious than Kingston, which quotes 2 GB/s in reads and writes. It is worth noting that Corsair is one of the few makers to state a write endurance for its external drive: 250 TB for the 1TB model, 500 TB for the 2TB and up to 1000 TB for the 4TB. Against that, it settles for a three-year warranty where Kingston and Western Digital offer five.

On ATTO Disk Benchmark, unsurprisingly, the EX100U cannot rival the Kingston XS2000: on the largest files the latter reaches 1.84 GB/s reading and 1.67 GB/s writing, where the Corsair has to make do with 1.68 and 1.53 respectively. On small files both are fairly weak, dropping below 10 MB/s on the very smallest (512 bytes). CrystalDiskMark confirms both the ATTO findings and Corsair's official figures, with almost 1.7 GB/s reading and 1.5 GB/s writing in sequential work. In random access the Corsair takes a little revenge, edging ahead of Kingston in both reading and writing; on the latter the EX100U is even the fastest drive the test bench has handled, at a little over 80 MB/s. A newer run using 64GB files rather than 1GB files, to gauge IOPS, gives results in line with expectations, leaving the Corsair a notch behind Western Digital's WD_Black P40.

To give the testing a more practical flavour, several file-copy sequences were run through Windows Explorer. Here the EX100U still cannot match the XTRM-Q or the XS2000, but it beats the WD_Black P40 and draws level with ASUS's ROG Strix Arion S500; its 622 MB/s in writing is perfectly acceptable. The linear-write test in AIDA64, which probes cache management, earns the drive an excellent report: it is beaten by the WD_Black P40, but with unshakeable stability and a 700 MB/s average it turns in a remarkable showing.

Given that plastic structure, the temperatures were of particular interest. The outcome is close to the XS2000's, if a shade hotter, with peaks at 64°C against 61°C for the Kingston model. Both are of course a long way from the Sabrent XTRM-Q, the best in this respect, whose metal structure keeps it to just 53°C.

Like most of its rivals, Corsair offers a companion application to download. It is in fact the same software whether the drive is one of the brand's internal or external SSDs — and that is unfortunate. Why unfortunate? Because the Corsair SSD Toolbox is an archaic piece of software, with a dated, not to say ugly, interface and options poorly suited to an external SSD. Of its accessible sections, three simply do not work on the EX100U: over-provisioning, optimisation and secure erase — and one wonders why that last is not supported. For the remaining three, Corsair does the bare minimum, with some basic information, a S.M.A.R.T. report, disk-clone management and a firmware-update option. Nothing to shout about.

Keen to uphold its excellent reputation, Corsair delivers a quality external SSD with a finish that is all but flawless. You can of course criticise the use of plastic where Sabrent prefers aluminium, but the aim is to make the EX100U as light as possible and, at 22 g, the goal is met. Corsair's drive is unquestionably one of the most compact on the market, a title it disputes with the Kingston XS2000, which is nonetheless a little pricier. To justify that price difference, Kingston can point to slightly higher performance and to the little rubber sleeve that guards against mishaps. Between the XS2000 and this EX100U, then, it comes down to budget. Either way, it is hard to be disappointed by these little marvels you can genuinely slip into a trouser pocket.