Portable storage is all the rage right now, with NAND flash manufacturers now offering blazing fast backup/transfer solutions to the masses. How does Crucial’s offering stand up in a fierce market?
Product on Review: Crucial X8 Portable SSD
Manufacturer: Crucial
Street Price:
500GB: GBP £109.19 / USD $119.95
1TB: GBP £149.99 / USD $164.95
Crucial, a Micron company, have been delivering competitively priced, high-performance NAND flash and DRAM products for over 20 years and today we look at their latest external SSD, the Crucial X8 Portable SSD. Crucial aim to use all of their expertise to deliver a safe, fast product at a great value price.
When it comes to backing up your data, or transporting files, relying on hard drives has a few drawbacks, chief amongst which are their susceptibility to drop/vibration damage, and their relatively slow speeds. Those two weaknesses can be improved upon largely by solid state storage, where the Crucial X8 can excel.
Offering the drive in 500GB and 1TB capacities, with speeds up to 1050MB/s in both directions, the drive can be used for modestly-sized backups, as a Steam drive to take round to a friend’s or just for transferring files at speeds way in excess of what a typical USB flash drive is capable of.
Thanks to the aluminium shell and rubber caps, the Crucial X8 also looks great and offers a degree of physical protection of your data, and you can even have it in any colour you want, as long as it’s black.
The Crucial X8 offers support for the PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Android, Chromebook and iPad Pro, making this a truly versatile backup/storage device.
The 500GB is priced at £109.19/$119.95, with the 1TB model coming in at £149.99/$164.95. There’s plenty of competition in this segment, so let’s see how it compares to the likes of the SAMSUNG T7 Touch and SanDisk Extreme Pro.
Crucial on the X8 Portable SSD:
Protect your memories with the Crucial X8 Portable SSD — back up important photos, videos, and documents with up to 1TB capacity. Expand storage on your PS4™, Xbox One, iPad Pro, Android device, or simply free up space on your computer quickly with speeds up to 1050MB/s.1,2 The Crucial X8 runs up to 1.8x faster than other portable SSDs and up to 7.5x faster than portable HDDs.1 Store with confidence on the Crucial X8.
Technical Specifications
SSD Series – X8
Warranty – Manufacturer’s 3 Year Limited
Sequential Read – 1050MB/s
Capacity – 1TB
Interface – PCIe G3 1×4 / NVMe
Specs – SSD portable Crucial X8 1TB • USB 3.1 Gen-2 • Up to 1050MB/s sequential read
Capacity Range – 500GB to 1TB
Warranty – Manufacturer’s 3 Year Limited
Sequential Read – 1050MB/s
Capacity – 1TB
Interface – PCIe G3 1×4 / NVMe
Specs – SSD portable Crucial X8 1TB • USB 3.1 Gen-2 • Up to 1050MB/s sequential read
Capacity Range – 500GB to 1TB
Packaging, Bundle & Closer Look
Crucial’s packaging is always neat and tidy, usually sporting a blue and white theme. The drive is clearly photographed on the front, with claimed speeds, compatibility and the capacity in the plain sight.
The rear of the packaging is a wall of text, in a million different languages. If you need extra information, you really need to visit the website that’s printed in the centre.
Alongside the SSD, there’s a single USB cable and a small instruction manual.
Measuring up at 110mm in length, 52mm in width and 11mm thick, the Crucial X8 is a relatively small device.
The rear of the drive is almost identical to the front.
Crucial, unlike the other external SSD manufacturers we’ve seen, have only included a single USB cable, with a small USB Type-A to USB Type-C adaptor that transforms one end of the cable.
Test Setup & Methodology
Our test system is formatted and a fresh version of Windows is installed with just drives in place – no additional applications. Windows is then updated to the latest release and the drivers are installed.
Included in the list of benchmarks are the following applications:
Benchmarks
Anvil Pro
AS SSD
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46
CrystalDiskMark
AIDA64
Games Transfer (Rise of the Tomb Raider, Total War: WARHAMMER & War Thunder – 85.3GB)
Test system:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
Motherboard: MSI Prestige X570 Creation
Graphics: AMD Radeon RX480
Memory: 16GB (2x 8GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000MHz
PSU: Corsair RM750x
OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-Bi
Benchmarks: Anvil Pro
Anvil Pro from Anvil Storage utilities is one of the most popular storage benchmarking utilities today thanks to the large suit of tests available. You can test pretty much anything from Read/write Speed to IOPs with many variables to tweak allowing you to get either a single or host of results to compare with other likeminded enthusiasts. In our test we ran the standard suite 5 times, subtracting both the highest and lowest scores and determined the final result from the average of the remaining three results.
Benchmarks: AS SSD
AS SSD Benchmark is a straightforward tool for measuring the speed of your SSD drive.
Simply launch the program, choose your drive, click Start, and it’ll test your SSD’s read and write speed in a variety of ways, delivering a score for each when it’s done. And if that’s not enough, there are also additional file copy and compression-related benchmarks available from the Tools menu. (The author’s support page is German only, but if you need further English explanations then there’s a thread on the program at the OCZ Technology forum.).
Simply launch the program, choose your drive, click Start, and it’ll test your SSD’s read and write speed in a variety of ways, delivering a score for each when it’s done. And if that’s not enough, there are also additional file copy and compression-related benchmarks available from the Tools menu. (The author’s support page is German only, but if you need further English explanations then there’s a thread on the program at the OCZ Technology forum.).
Benchmarks: ATTO
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Benchmarks: AIDA64
With this module, we can measure the performance of the PC’s storage devices, including (S)ATA or SCSI hard disk drives, RAID arrays, optical drives, solid-state drives (SSD), USB drives and memory cards. It also allows us to perform write tests, which helps us detect fake products and errors on the devices. In order to attain reliable benchmark results we have to make sure to close all background applications.
Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is an open source disk drive benchmark tool for Microsoft Windows. Based on Microsoft’s MIT-licensed Diskspd tool, this graphical benchmark is commonly used for testing the performance of solid-state storage. It works by reading and writing through the filesystem in a volume-dependent way. It generates read/write speeds in sequential and random positions with varying numbers of queues and threads.
Benchmarks: Games Transfer
To test the “real world” performance of the drive, we transfer the Rise of the Tomb Raider, Total War: WARHAMMER and War Thunder Steam files from an M.2 NVMe drive to the external drive. These files total 85.3GB and feature a mix of large and small files.
Conclusion
All things considered, Crucial’s efforts on the X8 Portable SSD are very good, with few negatives to counter that.Kicking off with the chassis, not only does it look really good, with its curved, pebble-like shape, it’s also very sturdy thanks to the rubber end-caps and aluminium body. You get a real sense that Crucial have designed and built the device properly.
Performance is another positive. We’ve reviewed quite a few portable USB Type-C SSDs now, many of which have claimed to beat the magical 1000MB/s barrier, but none of them have, until now. The Crucial X8 got very close to its claimed speed of 1050MB/s in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, scoring 1025MB/s. It scores highly across all benchmarks, and averages out as the leader across our test suite.
Crucial’s decision to include a single cable with a Type-A to Type-C adaptor is a novel idea, and we like it, but a way of retaining the adaptor would’ve been good. Just a small something to tether the two pieces together so the adaptor doesn’t go walkies, never to be found again.
This device is also touted as being perfect for backing up on the go, and quickly. The quickly part is all well and good thanks to the brilliant performance of the drive but some bundled software with backup functionality would go further to help bolster those aims.
All in, the Crucial X8 is a good value, stupidly fast external SSD, but the lack of software and security on the drive might have customer’s lean towards the Samsung T7 Touch instead, but you’ll pay more for that.
Pros
+ Sturdy chassis
+ Stylish design
+ Blistering performance
+ Excellent compatibility
+ 3-year warranty
+ Good value
Cons
– USB Type-A adaptor easy to lose
– No included backup software
+ Sturdy chassis
+ Stylish design
+ Blistering performance
+ Excellent compatibility
+ 3-year warranty
+ Good value
Cons
– USB Type-A adaptor easy to lose
– No included backup software
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