In one look
Expert rating
Benefits
- Best 10 Gbps performer
- Compact and rounded design
The inconvenients
- Only available in pale gold
- More expensive than the competition
Our opinion
Slightly faster and slightly more expensive than the competition at the time of this writing, SK Hynix’s first foray into USB SSDs, the Beetle X31 is a mixed success.
Best Prices Today: SK Hynix Beetle X31 USB SSD
$71.06
Evocative designs, catchy names, and attractive packaging all help sell a product. This is evidenced by Seagate and WD’s practice of marketing essentially the same storage devices to mainstream users and gamers. Not to mention Apple, which has reaped trillions from its renowned attention to product presentation and clever marketing terminology.
SK Hynix has followed suit to some extent with its exceptionally high performance Beetle X31 external SSD. The name and packaging are evocative (The Mummy?), just like the design… a little. I actually wish they had gone to town thematically with the actual look of the player, but given the chart-topping performance, I’m going to give up.
Further reading: Check out our roundup of the best portable hard drives and SSDs to learn more about competing products.
Design and price
With a fairly vivid imagination (and the suggestion of the image on the packaging below), the X31 looks a bit like a beetle. Without appendages or division of elytra and thorax, that is.
SK Hynix might have been better off calling it “Scarab” and using more evocative colors than the pale gold it comes in. But that’s a matter for marketing professionals.
The Beetle X31 East approximately the size of a beetle at approximately 1.8 inches wide, 2.9 inches long, and 0.57 inches thick. It weighs less than two ounces and the metal shell seems very sturdy. There are non-slip pads on the bottom and a Type-C port and activity light on one end.
As of this writing, the X31 Beetle is available on Amazon in 512GB for $71.06 and 1TB for $92.69. In the UK it’s £65.99 and £85.99 on Amazon UK respectively.
That’s above average for a 1TB, 10Gbps USB SSD and could be a tough sell when Samsung’s popular 1TB T7 laptop is $10 cheaper or £20 cheaper in the UK .
The innards of the X31 should be NVMe from the 1GB/s performance we’ve seen. SATA peaks at around 550 Mbps, which rules that out. The internal design undoubtedly leverages one of SK Hynix’s own SSDs. TLC NAND is probably used, judging by its performance when the secondary cache is exhausted. More on that below.
The SK Hynix Beetle X31 recorded a faster overall time than the 10Gbps competition in our 48GB transfer tests.
Performance
The Beetle X31 was found to be slightly faster than the competition overall, although the margin would be largely imperceptible to the naked eye. Still, faster is faster, and SK Hynix can hang its hat on the Beetle’s success.
Single-queue, single-threaded sequential read is where the X31 broke down in CrystalDiskMark 8. O therwise, it was just a hair slower than the SanDisk Pro-G40.
The SK Hynix Beetle X31 recorded a faster overall time than the 10Gbps competition in our 48GB transfer tests.
Although the Beetle X31 got a very good write time of 450 GB, it achieved it in an odd way. It started at around 450 Mbps for the first 50 GB or so, climbed to around 850 Mbps for the majority of the write, then when it ran out of secondary cache towards the end (treating TLC like SLC, writing a bit /level instead of three bits/eight voltage levels), it dropped to around 250 Mbps.
It’s the first stint that’s unusual, not the middle or the end. This was replicated on all initial runs, as well as additional runs we ran to make sure what we were seeing.
Note that the time listed below occurred when the drive was new. It was found to be significantly slower (around 100 seconds longer) writing 450 GB after running our 48 GB tests. In other words, expect somewhat slower large file writes at from the 1TB drive during daily use.
The Beetle X31 took the top spot among 10Gbps SSDs in the synthetic benchmarks and our 48GB transfer tests. It could also have taken the top spot from the OWC Envoy Pro FX in the 450GB write if it was available as a 2TB model, though it might have been close given the X31’s propensity for slow bootups.
Should you buy the SK Hynix Beetle X31?
The X31 is currently our best 10Gbps performer, but being slightly faster doesn’t make up for its higher price. Either way, it’s a cozy design with a fun and entertaining nickname. Competitor performance so close, buy this category on price.
How we test
External drive tests are currently using Windows 11, 64-bit running on an X790 (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 processor combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (64GB total memory). 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are built into the rear panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48 GB transfer tests use an ImDisk RAM disk occupying 58 GB of the 64 GB of total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a 2TB Samsung 990 Pro which is also running the OS.
Each test is performed on a newly formatted drive and TRIM so that the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance decreases due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors.
Caution: The performance figures shown apply only to the drive shipped to us and the capacity tested. SSD performance can and will vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips for shotgun reads/writes and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching. Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a significant discrepancy between the performance you feel and the performance youth reportby all means, let us know.
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