Crucial X8 Portable SSD review: An affordable USB drive for mainstream users - beusbeffight

Crucial

At a Glance

Adept's Rating

Pros

Comparatively affordable
Truehearted for everyday operations
Farsighted warranty and last TBW rating

Cons

Slows drastically writing off cache to 80MBps

Our Verdict

The Crucial X8 Portable SSD is an affordable alternative to Samsung's T5 and Sandisk's Extremist Portable. Because it slows down drastically during long writes, it's non a beatific option for video or other data-intensive work.

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Of import's X8 Portable SSD (1TB as tested) is affordable, fast with everyday tasks, and sports a classy design. It feels nice in the hand and looks good emerging from your pocket. Just there is a performance caveat for those who work with very large files and data sets.

Intention and specs

Crucial takes a slightly diametric draw near to the intent of its X8 Portable SSD by mixing materials. The main trunk is anodized atomic number 13, and there are plastic inserts continual crossways each side, with grippier end caps. They're all shades of black, and the overall effect is quite an nice.

The X8 is one of the bigger portable drives I've tested. Measurement 4.33 x 0.45 x 2.08 inches (width/depth/height), and weighing just shy of 3.5 ounces, it's not quite a as husky as Samsung's X5, but more like Sandisk's Extreme In favor of Portable SSD. IT sits in your hand nicely.

The X8 connects using USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) and is available in two capacities: 500GB ($119.95 from CrucialRemove non-product link) and 1TB ($164.95 along Amazon), the last mentioned being the capacity we proved. The NAND is TLC, which is plenty fast for an external USB SSD—most of the time. Yes, other tease about functioning.

crucial x8 ssd flat front — Crucial's X8 portable SSD is a handsome drive that's svelte, but with a nice smooth texture and heft up.

The X8 Takeout SSD ships with a Type-C to Type-C cable, with a Type-C to Type-A adapter.

Performance

For the vast majority of our testing, the 1TB Crucial X8 Portable SSD performed the likes of a champion. That covers 99.999% of likely scenarios. However, in the one test where the X8 Outboard SSD fell short—the 450GB write out test—it fell short by miles. More thereon in a routine, and second to the good intelligence in CrystalDiskMark 6 (see darkest bars below).

cdm6 crucial x8 — For 1GB files, the Crucial X8 Portable SSD is as fast as the contention. Yearner bars are better.

CrystalDiskMark 6 (shown above) hierarchical the X8 Movable SSD as basically equal to the competition. The numbers in the chart higher up are very competitive, and indicate execution for relatively short 1GB read and write tasks. Completely the new CDM 6 numbers game were on track equally well.

48gb crucial x8 — When on memory cache, as it was the immense majority of the time, the X8 is almost as fast as SanDisk's Extreme Portable Pro. Shorter bars are advisable.

However, as with the other takeout USB SSD drives we've tested, real-life performance didn't pair the agglutinative bench mark results. The X8 Portable SSD's 48GB copy test results (shown above) are highly competitory, nearly the equal of those turned in by SanDisk's top-dog Immoderate Takeout Pro.

And then…in that location was the 450GB drop a line test. Most users will never write this large a file, operating room this amount of information in a single sitting. We do it to mental testing the limits of the movement's caching techniques. Most external SSDs maintain at anyplace from 400MBps to 600MBps. The Crucial X8 Portable SSD wrote at almost 600MBps for the number one 190GB Oregon so, then it sank to a rather sickly 80MBps for the take a breather of the test. No, the enormously long-lived depressing-blue BAR you see below is not a good thing. It's over an hour, where the next-slowest drive took a little low-level 23 minutes. Yowser.

450gb crucial x8 — The Crucial X8 Portable SSD's long replicate rate was good for the first 180GB or so, then it fell off the cliff. Its subsequent pace, barely supra 80MBps, was slower than a hard drive. Shorter bars are definitely better.

We oasis't seen an SSD of any case drip to that Low of a write rate in several years, basically since the dawn of TLC. Annotation, overly, that this was the 1TB capacity drive. The 500GB model will likely drop out of cache at the 90GB mark.

The Crucial X8 Takeout SSD isn't doing anything weird. Any time an SSD runs out of hive up, performance will suffer until the data is moved to the normal NAND, a unconscious process that can take several proceedings Oregon Sir Thomas More. But it's doing it sooner than expected in the write process. Remember, however, that there are few scenarios outside of the video world where you'll ever so write such large files Beaver State amounts of data to the drive.

Testing is performed on Windows 10 64-bit running connected a Core i7-5820K/Asus X99 Deluxe organisation with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (NVidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics batting order, and an Asmedia ASM2142 USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbs) card. Also on board are a Gigabyte GHz-Range of mountains Thunderbolt 3 card and Softperfect's Ramdisk 3.4.6, which is used for the 48GB say and write tests.

Smooth and classic

I like the look and feel of the Essential X8. It's a great performer the vast majority of the time, and as some as I'm articled to inform you of the slow carrying into action off cache, I can also tell you that I wouldn't hesitate to use the drive myself.

Notwithstandin, if you use your external SSD to storage large television files (sore nasal-resolution, Ultra Blu-ray rips), better-suited drives include Sandisk's Extreme Takeout Pro and the Samsung T7, which is a degraded drive with fingerprint security.

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Jon is a Juilliard-trained instrumentalist, former x86/6800 programmer, and long-time (late 70s) computer partizan living in the San Francisco quest area. jjacobi@pcworld.com