Introduction & Closer Look
The most cost effective way to improve the performance of a PC or laptop is without doubt replacing a mechanical hard drive with an SSD… however it’s not as cheap as it used to be. With prices showing no sign of dropping, a drive of any meaningful size is still going to set you back in excess of £100. Therefore if you are on a tight budget, but you still want the performance increase an SSD brings, you will be forced to look at smaller capacity drives.
Today we look at one such product, in the shape of a 64GB capacity drive from Drevo. Retailing at just £28.99 at the time of review, how will it do when we put it to the same tests as with previous, bigger capacity drives?
The X1 Pro comes packaged in fairly non-descript box, with just the Drevo logo to the top, with a little more information printed on the back.
As with our previous review of it’s bigger capacity brother, the drive itself is presented in a black metal shell, with a large sticker detailing the product name, logo, and stated drive speeds. For a budget option, it’s nice to see that a metal casing has been used, as opposed to plastic like some competitors at this price point.
A further label on the back of drive pretty much repeats the information displayed on the rear of the outer packaging.
It has been quite tricky to find any detailed specifications of this drive, so on opening the outer casing, we reveal that the controller Drevo have used is the SM2246EN from Silicon Motion.
Specifications
- Form Factor: 2.5” 7mm
- Capacity: 64GB
- Interface: SATAIII (backwards compatible with SATAII, SATAI)
- Sequential Read: up to 400MB/s
- Sequential Write: up to 300MB/s
- 4KB Random Read: up to 70k IOPS
- 4KB Random Write: up to 65k IOPS
- Warranty: 3 years limited
Test Setup & Performance
Test Setup:
- CPU – AMD Ryzen 7 1700
- Motherboard – Asus ROG STRIX X379-F Gaming
- Cooler – Cryorig H7 Quad Lumi
- GPU – ZOTAC GTX 1060 6GB AMP! Edition
- RAM – Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 32GB DDR4 2666MHz
- SSD – Crucial BX300 240GB
- PSU – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 11 1000w
- OS: Windows 10 64 bit
Methodology
All benchmarks are done on a fresh install of Windows 10 Professional 64-bit that is fully up-to-date with Windows Updates to ensure that the performance reflects a real-world scenario and not that of a tweaked benchmarking system.
Benchmarks
AS SSD – 4K read and write speeds & sequential read and write speeds
4.75GB Transfer Test – Time taken in seconds to transfer files to the SSD; fastest and quickest drive wins!
Performance
AS SSD
4.75GB Transfer Test
Conclusion
Performance
With a reduced claim of read/write speeds of just 400/300MB/s respectively, I never expected it to be smashing its way to the top of our charts. In fact, during testing we never got close to those anyway using the AS SSD application, witnessing just 324MB/s read speeds, and 259MB/s write.
Given these results, it was even more surprising that during our real world test of transferring 4.75GB of data to the drive, the X1 Pro 64GB showed outstanding performance! Total transfer time took just a shade under 9 seconds, which is mightily impressive.
Design
The design cues here are identical to the 256GB capacity drive previously tested. During that review, my colleague Gavin was critical of the fact that the stated read/write speeds were so visible. Whilst this doesn’t bother me quite as much, I do think that without these the aesthetic of the drive would be improved, as the remainder of the design is quite striking. If your SSD isn’t going to be on display in machine though (especially if it’s going into a laptop), then it really doesn’t matter.
Value
At the time of the review, the Drevo X1 Pro 64GB is selling for £28.99 in the UK, meaning a price of £0.45 per GB. Buying a bigger capacity drive will give you better bang for your buck, but if you are on a strict budget, then you can’t really argue at the relatively cheap price point for the drive itself.
Final Thoughts
A drive of this size is really only going to be suitable to house your operating system, and a limited number of saved files. If you want to use this in a gaming PC, then you will need a bigger capacity drive for your games & save files. However, if you just want to breathe new life into an ailing old laptop, then at less than £29 this represents a low cost solution.
Buy from Amazon UK: £28.99
Huge thanks to Drevo for sending the X1 Pro 64GB SSD in for review
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Performance
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Design
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Value
Summary
Pros:
– Fantastic real word performance in our 4.75GB transfer test
– Cheapest 64GB SSD on the market at the time of review
Cons:
– Drive capacity only suitable for OS and limited number of saved files
– Never came close to achieving stated read/write speeds
pointless really. not big enough for a system drive and not big enough for a small games library. save your money.
Agreed that it’s too small for a games library, but disagree that it’s not big enough for a boot drive. I have personally re-purposed an old laptop with a 64GB SSD, with W10 OS loaded onto it. The laptop is now perfectly serviceable to use to surf the web, and any files worked on are saved to OneDrive.