Pros & Cons
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- Highly portable
- Available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB capacities
- Low cost per gigabyte, especially at higher capacities
- New highs in two of our benchmark tests
- Dust-proof and water-resistant, with IP65 rating, and drop-proof to 9.8 feet
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- Lacks AES hardware-based encryption
- Three-year warranty is low for a Crucial SSD
- Requires less common type of USB port to achieve Gen 2x2 speeds
Crucial X10 Specs
| Bus Type | PCI Express 3.0 x4 |
| Capacity (Tested) | 4 |
| Controller Maker | Silicon Motion |
| Interface (Computer Side) | USB-C |
| Internal Form Factor | Not Applicable |
| Internal or External | External |
| NAND Type | TLC |
| NVMe Support | |
| Rated Maximum Sequential Read | 2100 |
| Rated Maximum Sequential Write | 2000 |
| Warranty Length | 5 |
Micron's Crucial X10 external SSD, introduced nearly two years after the Crucial X10 Pro, offers one great advantage over its slightly more expensive series-mate. The X10 (starts at $119.99 list for its base 1TB version; $329.99 for 4TB as tested) is available in five capacities, including 6TB and 8TB—the latter matching the highest capacity available in external SSDs sold by consumer retailers—and at a very good cost per gigabyte, especially in the higher capacities. Its main downside is its lack of AES hardware-based encryption, which might limit its use in the corporate world, but it is a good pick for photographers and videographers, as well as for storing a game or media library. For its exceptional value as a high-capacity drive, it earns PCMag's Editors' Choice award as an external budget SSD.
Design: A Featherweight and Matte-Blue Pack Rat
Measuring 0.4 by 2 by 2.6 inches and weighing just over an ounce, the matte-blue X10 is a small slab with rounded corners, and supremely portable. It closely resembles previous Crucial X9 and X10 series SSDs, with minuscule differences in size and weight, and in the placement of the little corner hole to fit a cord or lanyard.
A USB-C port resides in the middle of one of the X10's narrower ends, and a short USB-C-to-USB-C cable is included. The X10 supports the speedy USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 spec. To avail yourself of its blazing throughput, you will need either a compatible computer (many models, even recent ones, lack a 2x2 port), or to add a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 expansion card to your desktop system. Otherwise, the drive reverts to USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds, which max out at about 1,000MBps.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Capacity and Pricing: More Space for Less Cash
Most external-SSD families max out at 4TB (or less), while the 4TB version of the Crucial X10 we tested is only midway to its peak capacity. Only a handful of other external SSDs are available in 8TB versions; among them are the Samsung Portable SSD T5 EVO and the Oyen Digital U34 Bolt—both of which we reviewed at that capacity—and the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD.
The Crucial X10 is the only USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 of the lot; the Oyen supports USB4 and Thunderbolt 4, the SanDisk Extreme is USB 3.2 Gen 2, and the T5 EVO has poky SATA internals. Price-wise, the X10 easily undercuts even the slower SSDs noted here. At its retail pricing as of this writing, the 8TB model comes in at just 5.5 cents per gigabyte. Often, manufacturers charge a premium for the highest-capacity versions of their drives, but the X10's 6TB and 8TB versions cost less per gigabyte than the other capacities, which become progressively less cost-effective as you go from 4TB down to 1TB.
Drive and Data Protection: Ruggedized, Unencrypted, and Backed for Three Years
An Ingress Protection (IP) rating of IP65 tells us the X10 has been ruggedized, certified to provide water and dust resistance. While it is impervious to fine dust, its water resistance is limited to being sprayed or splashed with liquid rather than complete immersion. The X10 is certified drop-proof up to three meters (9.8 feet).
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As mentioned earlier, while the Crucial X10 Pro supports 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption—considered the gold standard among civilian-level data encryption solutions—the X10 lacks such encryption. For business travelers, and people who store sensitive or personal documents on their external drives, this is probably a deal-breaker. For other users, such as ones who never travel with their external SSDs, it may be of little importance. I wouldn't lose any sleep if I were to lose one of my music or photo-backup SSDs, but I would worry if a drive containing my writings or my financial Excel documents went missing. The X10's high capacity makes it a good choice as a photographer's or videographer's scratch disk, a role in which the lack of encryption is unlikely to be an issue.
Micron backs the X10 with a three-year warranty, not unusual in the storage world but short of the five years for which it warranties the X10 Pro, X9, and X9 Pro. However, although the longer warranty may give one a sense of security, unless you regularly write large quantities of data to an external SSD, it's unlikely to fail under normal operation, even within five years.
Performance Testing: An SSD With the Write Stuff
We test USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 external SSDs using one of three PC Labs storage testbeds, a desktop PC built on an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard with an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition CPU and an Nvidia GeForce graphics card. We use the motherboard's native 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 port for testing most drives; for 20Gbps Gen 2x2 drives like the X10, we use a Gen 2x2 port added via an Orico PCI Express expansion card.
We subjected the X10 to our usual suite of external solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, the PCMark 10 data drive benchmark, the 3DMark Storage gaming test, Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test, and our own folder transfer test. The drive comes preformatted in exFAT, which works out of the box with Macs, as well as Windows and Linux machines, Android devices, iPhones and iPads with a USB-C port, and Xbox and PlayStation consoles. So we ran the latter two tests first on an Apple MacBook Pro. Then we reformatted the drive in NTFS to run Crystal DiskMark, PCMark 10, and 3DMark on our Windows testbed.
The X10's best benchmark results were on the two write-speed tests in our benchmark suite. It eked out a new high score among USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 SSDs in Blackmagic's disk write throughput benchmark, with the Lexar Armor 700 Portable SSD just behind it, while decisively besting the field in Crystal DiskMark's sequential write test. (It was brought back down to Earth in Blackmagic's disk read test, where it turned in the lowest score, albeit just by a hair.) It even edged out the Crucial X10 Pro in both the PCMark 10 data drive general storage test and the 3DMark Storage gaming-centric benchmark.