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The EX400U comes in a compact box finished in the customary Corsair yellow and black colour scheme. On the front of the box is an image of the drive under which a label displays the headline Sequential read and write speeds (up to 4,000MB/s reads, up to 3,600MB/s writes) and the capacity of the drive.
The rear of the box has a multilingual description of the drive under which is a systems requirements box which lists the OS supported by the drive; Windows 10 or later, macOS 13 or later, iOS/iPadOS13 and later.
Constructed with plastic sides and bottom with an aluminium top the drive is finished in silver-grey and measures a wee 64.3mm x 64mm x 12mm and weighing in at 383g, it's small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. The bottom of the EX400U features a magnetic ring for easy attachment to any MagSafe-compatible device, such as iPhones.
The EX400U is the first drive we've seen that makes use of Phison's latest PS2251-21 (U21) controller. The four-channel PS2251-21 (U21) is the world's first native USB4 controller. Built on a 12nm process, the DRAM-less controller supports 3D TLC and QLC NAND with a transfer rate of up to 1600MT/s and has a maximum storage capacity of 32TB. The interface supports USB4 (40 Gbps), USB 3.2 Gen2x2 (20 Gbps), USB 3.2 Gen2x1 (10 Gbps), USB 3.2 Gen1 (5 Gbps) and is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 (480 Mbps).
To the left of the USB-C port is a white activity indicator LED.
Bundled in the box with the drive is a USB-Type C to USB Type-C (40Gb/s, 60W) cable.
Corsair’s SSD management utility is called SSD Toolbox. It's not the funkiest-looking GUI we've ever seen but having said that, it does give all you really need to keep an eye on the drive. It provides drive information and S.M.A.R.T details and also supports firmware updates, secure wiping of the drive, and drive optimisation. It usefully incorporates a disk cloning utility.
