When it comes to portable storage, you have quite a few options now depending on your needs. While portable HHDs used to be the standard, moving parts aren’t great for portability and can cause issues when you accidentally drop one of them. That’s why using something with no moving parts such as a USB thumb drive or a portable SSD is your best option. These are also much smaller and often faster. The SK hynix Beetle X31 is an example of a portable SSD that’s not only small and lightweight but also pretty stylish looking.
The first thing that entered my mind was why this was called the Beetle, but upon opening the package it all made sense. It sorta looks like a golden scarab that fits in the palm of your hand. Most of the corners and edges are rounded and the metallic gold paint has a nice glossy finish to it. The bottom of the Beetle X31 has two rubber strips for grip and one USB-C port on the side.
The casing is made of aluminum and is said to withstand drops of up to 2 meters. For added protection from drops, SK Hynix includes a clear protector that adds shock protection.
The version of the SK Hynix Beetle X31 we received is the 1TB option. It features a USB 3.2 Gen2 interface with read speeds of up to 1,050 MB/s and write speeds of up to 1,000 MB/s. It includes two cables, a USB-C to USB-C and a USB-C to USB-A cable. Both are about 6 inches long.
While quite a bit larger than a USB thumb drive, the SK hynix Beetle X31 is still quite small and easy to carry around. It’s amazing how small in size storage is these days. I’m actually using this for work right now to back up my important files on the go. Because the drive is well protected and doesn’t have any moving parts like older hard drives do, I can be sure that my data is safe and I won’t lose any of it due to any mishaps.
Of course, this drive is also great as an installation drive for games. While not quite as fast as my internal M.2 NVMe drives, load times were still quite short and it’s actually not a bad solution for those who have limited internal storage.
