Plextor EX1 128GB Portable USB-C SSD Review

Introduction Plextor hasn't just embraced the new generation of storage drives when it comes to internal drives, they have equally embraced the latest generation of external drives with their new EX1 portable SSD. The Plextor EX1 portable SSD utilizes USB Type-C Gen.2 which is capable of up to 10 Gbps transfer speeds and today I'm taking a closer look at the 128GB version of this drive. We already had a brief look at this amazing little drive during our visit to Computex earlier this year where the drive was running live benchmarks, and we liked what we saw. I already expressed my excitement back then and today I finally get to take this drive for a test spin of my own. Besides the 128GB model that I'm taking a closer look at today, the Plextor EX1 portable SSD is also available in a 256GB and a 512GB version. This tiny and portable SSD drive isn't much bigger than a lighter and only weighs 30grams. That truly isn't a lot and the dimensions of just 101.2 x 31.6 x 8.7 mm are just as impressive as the weight. While it uses the latest generation of USB connection that is capable of up to 10 Gbps throughput, the drive itself isn't that fast. But still, with its rating of up to 550MB/s at read operations and 500MB/s write operations, it easily rivals internal drives in the sequential performance and beats quite a few of them too. And it does that with its small size which makes it even more impressive. On the outside it uses the USB Type-C Gen.2 connection and comes with a type-C to type-A connector cable, internally it uses a VIA VL716 bridge controller to transform the connection from SATA to USB. You can naturally also get yourself a type-C to Type-C connector cable and use this drive on devices with that kind of port, such as modern mobile phones, laptops, and tablets. On the inside, it is actually one of Plextor's other drives, the M7VG SSD which features the Marvell Dean Controller and Toshiba 15nm TLC NAND. Thanks to the VIA bridge controller, that drive is now one of the most impressive external USB drives that I've seen to date. The drive is compatible with Windows OS, Linux OS, Mac OS, and Android-based systems which makes it compatible with pretty much everything. This is one of the great things about USB and its natural plug-and-play capabilities. Plextor backs the drive with a 5-year warranty which on its own is impressive, but even more so for an external drive. More often than not, we see lower warranties on external than internal drives, which just goes to show how much faith the company has in this drive. Plextor drives generally undergo hardcore testing and it is no different for the EX1 portable SSD. It has been tested for quality following 1008 hour zero-failure zero-error test standards and is rated for a mean time before failure of 240 million hours. On top of that, it also looks really stylish and awesome, and it is available in both a golden and a silver design. This is truly a portable SSD that lives up to both parts of the description. Performance all the way and small enough to take anywhere - and with up to 512GB capacity, you don't have to be picky with what files you want to bring along on your trips away from home. Feature Highlights Premium quality design with a stylish look Tuned to deliver a maximum professional performance under USB 3.1 interface Tested for quality following 1008 hour Zero-Failure Zero-Error test standard Extreme reliability of MTBBF 240 million hours 5-Year warranty Package and Accessories Plextor packed the EX1 portable SSD in a simple white box that displays the drive itself through the transparent middle while providing compatibility and connection specifications on the bottom. On the rear of the box are more details such as the rated performance, included accessories, dimensions and weight. Inside the box, you'll find the USB-C to USB-A connector cable, a quick start guide, and the practical carry bag for the drive and cable. Test Procedure Test system: Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 7-EU Intel Core i5-6600K EVGA GTX 980 SC Kingston Fury DDR4 2400MHz 32GB Samsung SM951 NVMe 256GB in RAID 0 be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 850W Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate Software used: AIDA64 Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage Utilities ATTO Disk Benchmark AS SSD Benchmark CrystalDiskMark 64bit IOMeter Windows 10 Pro In a bid to make our testing as thorough and as accurate as possible, we have devised a testing methodology to give us the maximum amount of data. Whilst this means that testing each drive will take considerably longer to test – nearly 36 hours - the picture that we are able to build upon the overall performance of each drive is far clearer and it provides a more accurate analysis at how a drive performs under different conditions. There are many ways to test a storage drive and we have chosen to include close to every test possible. We will start with a normal benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various fillage scenarios. Depending on how a drive is built, it might perform differently depending on how much data it already is storing. To test this, the drive will be tested empty as well as with 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage. For these tests, we will be using Anvil's Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, ATTO Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark. Following the fillage tests, the partition will be removed and we test the drive's raw performance. These tests will determine the hardware's capabilities while removing any interference from the set file system. AIDA64's storage benchmark and IOmeter are all great tools for this and they help us paint an even clearer picture of the drive. Durability is also a factor when it comes to NAND-based drives as the chips only can be rewritten so many times before they'll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. We also take this into consideration in our reviews, but real-world conditions would take years to complete. Luckily Anvil's Storage Utilities comes with an endurance test to simulate this. It is considerably faster, but it is still a process that can take up to three days where we'll write up to 10 TB data to the drive in the form of thousands and thousands of small files in various sizes and compressibility. Following the conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and order. This will give us a great view on how a drive will perform after 3 years of usage and that is a very relevant factor. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn't something normal users need to worry about. However, For these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. We want a clear picture of the drives performance with minimal interference from the operating system. On each page that follows with the benchmark results, I have inserted the screenshots from the benchmark results, created a drive analysis chart for fill-level as well as a drive comparison chart for each software used, where possible. AIDA64 AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. It provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one I'll be using. Fresh Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives, as the name says, a linear view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are actually a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Conditioned The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives, as the name says, a linear view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are actually a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Drive Performance Analysis Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil's Storage Utilities is a new benchmarking utility that we have started using here at eTeknix, it's completely free to download and has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive copes in the longer term. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Analysis Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. AS SSD The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests, the program measures the time it takes to read and write a 1 GB file respectively. To give a clearer picture of the drives tested, I've chosen to include all tests. Special the copy test is one that I think is relevant on the consumer level as it gives the user a view into one of the operations he's going to do many times. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Analysis Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Performance Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random 4KB/512KB read/write speeds. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. IOmeter IOmeter OMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behavior of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are Transfer Request Size, Percent Random/Sequential distribution, Percent Read/Write Distribution, Aligned I/O’s, Reply Size, and TCP/IP status among others. Sequential Performance Random 4K Performance Final Thoughts Pricing There isn't an official release time for the Plextor EX1 yet, but Plextor promised to keep us updated as soon as a date has been set. But the MSRP is something that I could find out and the 128GB version comes with a $69.99 price where the two bigger 256GB and 512GB models will cost you $104.99 and $184.99 respectively. Overview Plextor has a really long time of experience in the storage field, ranging back many years and it doesn't look like new types of technology is holding them back in any way. The EX1 portable USB-C Gen.2 SSD performed exceptionally well in our benchmarks and showed a performance that we usually only see from internal drives. Gone are the times where external drives are inferior towards external ones, at least to 95%. The sequential performance was amazing and we saw great results despite the small capacity in this 128GB drive. The two larger versions with 256GB and 512GB should show a more steady performance where we saw small drops or fluctuations. But even with those small fluctuations, the EX1 easily stood up to the rated performance and doesn't need to hide from anything. The one small point where it isn't as good as internal drives is at the random performance and that is due to how USB works rather than the drive itself. But even here it did very good for an external drive with 20K IOPS results. Design wise, the EX1 is just as amazing as it is performance wise. The exterior looks stunning and feels great to hold. On top of that, it's sturdy and impressively small. It will easily fit in your pocket which allows you to take all your favourite files with you on the go without having to think about extra space or weight to carry it. It also comes with a cute little bag to carry both the drive and the connector cable as well as protect both while you're on the go. Speaking of connector cable, the EX1 embraces the newest USB standards with a type-C connector and USB 3.1 Gen.2 performance. While the drive comes with a type-C to type-A cable, you could easily use an aftermarket type-C to type-C cable and connect it to the latest generation smartphones, tablets, and portable computers too. Pros Great performance Looks and feels great Tiny and lightweight Latest USB standards Cons Availability "The Plextor EX1 is without a doubt the best portable SSD that I've tested to date. It delivers an impressive performance, it is light-weight and compact, and it looks beautiful too." Thank You, Plextor for providing us with this review sample.