Drevo X1 Pro 64GB SSD review

This £32 64GB SSD promises to deliver big performance even at small capacities. We’re a fan of their keyboards, but can Drevo deliver the same budget appeal when it comes to flash storage? Let’s find out in our full review.

Design

The Drevo X1 Pro has a fun and eye-catching design, with a yellow lightning bolt on the front alongside its promised sequential read and write speeds: 400 MB/s for reads and 300 MB/s for writes. We’ll see about that!

Testing

In order to test the speed of the drive, we ran four synthetic benchmarks with varying payloads: CrystalDiskMark, AS SSD, ATTO and HD Tune Pro. Combined, these should give us a good idea of the drive’s performance compared to others at a similar price.

The Toshiba A100 we reviewed earlier is the most interesting comparison, but we’ve included other drives we’ve tested in the past as well in case they could be useful.

To see our test rig’s specifications, check out our component breakdown here!

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark has been one of my favourite benchmarks for evaluating storage speeds for a while now, thanks to its varied incompressible workload and extremely readable results. Here’s the 3.0.3 x64 version of the benchmark; all results are in MB/s.

CDM 3 Read	Seq	512K	4K	4K QD32
Toshiba A100 SSD	490	328	33	350
Drevo X1 Pro SSD	342	229	35	278
Toshiba P300 HDD	150	48	0.6	1.6
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	115	38	0.6	2.5
Toshiba Canvio Premium	118	43	0.5	0.6
Samsung T3	386	351	33	35
Sandisk Z410	508	357	13	146
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	502	447	45	368
Samsung 850 Evo	513	472	38	408
Samsung 840 Evo	515	473	35	397
Corsair Neutron GTX	450	376	27	328

CDM 3 Write	Seq	512K	4K	4K QD32
Toshiba A100 SSD	438	406	84	315
Drevo X1 Pro SSD	269	272	88	269
Toshiba P300 HDD	155	69	0.6	1.0
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	114	52	22	24
Toshiba Canvio Premium	117	50	1.3	1.3
Samsung T3	357	352	69	77
Sandisk Z410	407	355	97	250
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	474	394	113	316
Samsung 850 Evo	504	479	68	352
Samsung 840 Evo	500	390	86	313
Corsair Neutron GTX	480	468	69	158

The Drevo X1 Pro doesn’t impress out of the gate, boasting read speeds of only 342 MB/s — some way off the 400 MB/s promised. Write speeds are a little better, maxing out at 269 MB/s. At each step, performance is just a little bit behind the (admittedly larger) A100 drive.

AS SSD

AS SSD is another benchmarking tool quite similar to CrystalDiskMark, which uses predominantly incompressible data across a range of workloads including sequential tests, random performance and access times. First three numbers are MB/s and access time is in ms.

AS SSD Read	Seq	4K	4K QD64	Acc. Time	Score
Toshiba A100 SSD	489	37	319	N/A	405
Drevo X1 Pro SSD	325	27	249	N/A	308
Toshiba P300 HDD	155	0.5	1.6	N/A	18
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	73	1.8	15	26.3	15
Toshiba Canvio Premium	113	0.5	0.6	23.021	12
Samsung T3	345	24	32	0.100	91
Sandisk Z410	501	11	145	0.045	206
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	493	40	328	0.093	417
Samsung 850 Evo	516	34	382	0.059	467
Samsung 840 Evo	513	32	330	0.059	413
Corsair Neutron GTX	507	25	334	0.068	N/A

AS SSD Write	Seq	4K	4K QD64	Acc. Time	Score
Toshiba A100 SSD	430	74	288	0.209	405
Drevo X1 Pro SSD	258	76	247	0.046	349
Toshiba P300 HDD	114	0.5	0.6	16.7	13
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	46	19	5	18.2	39
Toshiba Canvio Premium	111	0.5	0.5	17.6	12
Samsung T3	367	56	71	0.055	163
Sandisk Z410	407	78	215	0.237	333
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	475	95	251	0.075	393
Samsung 850 Evo	497	66	299	0.051	415
Samsung 840 Evo	497	69	207	0.054	326
Corsair Neutron GTX	473	62	295	0.062	N/A

The X1 Pro again under-delivers in its sequential tests, coming in at speeds slower than other SSDs that we’ve tested. Things improve somewhat in random tests, becoming more competitive with the A100 and eclipsing some of our older (and much more expensive) drives.

Note that there seems to be a ‘read access times’ bug in AS SSD under the current version of Windows 10; there is always an error message for that portion of the test and no result is rendered.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Atto Read	1KB	4KB	64KB	256KB	1MB	8MB
Toshiba A100 SSD	76	286	552	548	561	561
Drevo X1 Pro SSD	71	232	348	347	348	348
Toshiba P300 HDD	27	85	129	123	135	190
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	9	20	26	26	26	26
Toshiba Canvio Premium	9	33	117	117	117	118
Samsung T3	18	67	329	371	377	404
Sandisk Z410	78	247	518	531	536	533
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	83	286	537	553	552	553
Samsung 850 Evo	80	269	538	551	558	558
Samsung 840 Evo	94	280	535	551	555	555
Corsair Neutron GTX	15	61	336	452	530	540

Atto Write	1KB	4KB	64KB	256KB	1MB	8MB
Toshiba A100 SSD	53	231	524	533	534	543
Drevo X1 Pro SSD	68	201	270	270	267	271
Toshiba P300 HDD	16	74	120	113	123	128
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	3	25	37	55	53	53
Toshiba Canvio Premium	10	41	115	115	116	116
Samsung T3	20	71	315	365	366	388
Sandisk Z410	69	184	419	423	426	428
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	79	251	510	526	525	525
Samsung 850 Evo	83	255	519	529	534	534
Samsung 840 Evo	81	260	515	527	533	534
Corsair Neutron GTX	15	142	474	470	493	498

Atto is always an interesting test because it shows the relationship between data set size and read and write speeds in considerable detail.

The X1 Pro SSD peaks pretty early compared to other drives, almost reaching its maximum speeds at just the 8KB data size mark. There’s a significant differential between read and write speeds, which is usual for a drive of this capacity — it’d be interesting to see how this changes on the 120GB drive. Regardless, the results show an SSD that doesn’t quite meet the 400 MB/s metric printed on its casing, although 350 MB/s is at least still noticeably faster than a mechanical hard drive.

HD Tune Pro

We conclude with HD Tune Pro, a benchmark which produces three scores for average read speed, read access time, and burst read rate.

HD Tune Pro 5.50 Read	Average	Access Time	Burst Rate
Toshiba A100 SSD	330 MB/s	0.042 ms	99 MB/s
Drevo X1 Pro SSD	356 MB/s	0.042 ms	248 MB/s
Toshiba P300 HDD	126 MB/s	14.6 ms	294 MB/s
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	90 MB/s	16.9 ms	87 MB/s
Toshiba Canvio Premium	114 MB/s	17.9 ms	140 MB/s
Samsung T3	269 MB/s	0.090 ms	171 MB/s
Sandisk Z410	358 MB/s	0.035 ms	140 MB/s
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	321 MB/s	0.087 ms	221 MB/s
Samsung 850 Evo	370 MB/s	0.044 ms	250 MB/s
Samsung 840 Evo	358 MB/s	0.041 ms	231 MB/s
Corsair Neutron GTX	340 MB/s	0.059 ms	231 MB/s

Here the X1 Pro turns in its best performance, showing low access times, relatively high burst rates and even a decently high average transfer rate. It’s interesting to see the X1 Pro do better than its peers here, perhaps due to the drawn-out nature of the test.

Wrapping up

The Drevo X1 Pro SSD is an interesting drive. At £32 it is one of the most affordable on Amazon, but there’s certainly a gap in performance between the X1 and slightly more expensive drives — and it doesn’t even come close to living up to its claim of 400 MB/s read speeds. Still, it’s hard to argue too much given the price, and it’s certainly a faster writing drive than the standard Drevo X1, so on the whole it still gets our recommendation for those on tight budgets!

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1 response to “Drevo X1 Pro 64GB SSD review”

John Dempson

February 13, 2020 at 11:48 pm

These SSD perform quite well (I’ve had my Win 10 OS on it and it was well fast enough) but mine has gone kaputt after just 7 months. The number of people with this issue is rising fast – look on the Amazon reveiews and see that all of the 1 star reviews have had their SSD give up after between 8 days and 14 months and not one has been able to claim on the warranty – most getting no reply at all from the email address given on the website.
Maybe this is why Amazon have stopped selling them and even only list one now (the 60GB model) and that is always out of stock.
I think these SSDs have been a failure, and Drevo is probably now trying to wash its hands of the whole shebang.

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