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.

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.

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 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.

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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