Crucial X10Pro 2TB Portable SSD
3. Installation
In order to use this drive you simply have to insert it at a TypeC to your system. The drive is pre-formatted at the exFAT operating system that is compatible with both PC/MAC/Android/PS5 devices and has around 1.81TB of free space.
Inside you will find several links to various websites and a PDF file with welcome information.
Micron has included several offers to the X10 Pro customers:
- Micron is working with Adobe to give every Crucial X10 Pro owner one month of Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps complimentary upon registering their drive. Terms and conditions apply.
- Micron is working with Mylio to offer every Crucial X10 Pro owner the opportunity to receive one-month of Mylio Photos software that can be activated through an on-drive URL and inside the on-drive PDF. Terms and conditions apply.
- Micron is working with Hedge, to help create awareness of Hedge’s offering through an on-drive URL and inside the on-drive PDF.
- Micron works with Acronis, offering every Crucial X10 Pro customer access to Acronis True Image for Crucial software for free, to help users protect and back up their data from their Windows devices.
The CrystalMarkInfo software gives us some first information about the drive. Note that, currently, Crucial's own Storage Executive software doesn't support the drive (SMART information, firmware updates, etc..), hopefully, a newer build will eventually support it soon.
By connecting the drive and by using USB Drive Info, we can get more information, the drive seems to report that is capable of up to 3.2 Gen 2x2 USB format.
The device under Windows 11 by default doesn't have Write Caching enabled, so we suggested enabling it since we want the best possible read/writing speed. Of course in that case you have to be careful when removing the device in order not to lose files that are still in the memory cache.
We fired up the latest available build of CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4c and we noticed much lower than expected. What happened? Our first PC was based around the AMD X570E chipset, which supports only USB Gen 3.2 ports, therefor performance is limited to ~1GB/sec maximum reading/writing performance.
The Crucial X10 Pro Portable SSD has a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 (20Gb/s) interface. On a high-performance system, it can deliver speeds up to 2,100MB/s, which is illustrated in the following table. In other words, if you don't have a modern system based on the latest hardware, you won't get the advertised reading/writing speeds.
Then we moved to our main PC test system that is based around the AMD X670E chipset, which has support for USB Gen3.2 2x2, and this time we had better performance. The drive was formatted under exFAT and with Windows 11 writing cache enabled. We got around 2.135MB/sec reading and 1.521MB/sec writing performance.
With a different motherboard/processor, Crucial demonstrated that writing could get up to 2038MB/sec, so performance will vary according to the used motherboard and file format.