SK Hynix Beetle X31 1TB SSD USB Drive Review
Sometimes you just need a portable SSD. That happened to me recently when building a desktop PC from scratch. After assembling the system, installing all the components, and wiring everything up, I found I needed to install not only Windows 11, but also new networking drivers and a BIOS update, all of which were much easier to do using files downloaded on a different computer and transferred via an external hard drive. I reached for the SK Hynix Beetle X31, a 1TB external SSD that had recently been added to my products-to-test pile, and decided to give it a real-world test right out of the box.
Korean company SK Hynix is best known for internal RAM and storage products, and this is its first external SSD. The drive is small, measuring around 0.6 x 1.8 x 2.9 inches and weighs just under two ounces. (I’m holding it in the image below for scale.) In a world of anonymous-looking black or gray USB sticks and external drives, the Beetle stands out, with gently curved edges and a speckled champagne gold finish (similar to the gold finish on some MacBooks).
There’s a single USB-C port on one edge, and the box includes both USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A cables. That connection is a USB 3.2 (Gen 2) connection, so it should be plenty fast, with advertised read/write speeds of 1,000MB/s. In the industry standard CrystalDiscMark storage test, the drive scored 1047MB/s Read and 1048MB/s Write in the sequential benchmark.
In the course of my recent desktop PC build, I used the SK Hynix Beetle for my OS install, and then to install networking drivers and finally the BIOS update, and it performed all of these tasks easily, which is what you want from an external SSD — to just do its job and not get in the way. Now I keep it handy for installing benchmark files on different laptops I test. With its rugged aluminum case, I don’t have any concerns about throwing it in my bag for travel.
My only knock against the drive is that the box art shows a cool Egyptian scarab design, and I was secretly hoping the drive itself would look like that. The SK Hynix Beetle comes in one size, with a 1TB capacity.