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. We looked at the 1TB version a while back but now we’re back with the newly released 2TB version of the SK hynix Beetle X31.
The 2TB version of the SK hynix Beetle X31 looks exactly the same as the original 1TB version, except with a different color. While the 1TB comes in gold, the 2TB comes in a metallic grey. Aside from the color, the body has the same rounded corners and edges. 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 SK Hynix Beetle X31 features a USB 3.2 Gen2 interface with read and write speeds of up to 1,050 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. 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 an internal M.2 NVMe drive, load times were still quite short and it’s actually not a bad solution for those who have limited internal storage. Since you can connect via USB-C or regular USB-A, you can connect the SK hynix Beetle X31 is a number of game consoles, desktop PCs, and laptops, as well as tablets and even to your smartphone. This comes in handy when you need to transfer files off your phone if you’re running out of space.
The SK hynix Beetle X31 2TB should be available soon at the time of this review.
