Looking closer, there are no activity lights to break up the unibody construction. To the drive’s design credit, the external casing – ending in grippy, rubberised sections that ought to avoid easy marking – does a great job at keeping everything cool; internal temperature rose to merely 48°C after 10 minutes of sequential writing, while the casing ran only five degrees warmer than ambient room level. The Crucial X8 Portable SSD isn’t doing anything weird. Any time an SSD runs out of cache, performance will suffer until the data is moved to the normal NAND, a process that can take several minutes or 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 write such large files or amounts of data to the drive. Both the HP P600 and the ADATA SC680 show signs of a SLC cache. On the other hand, the X6 starts off at around 200 MBps and goes down to around 35 MBps after 240GB of continuous writes. At 195 MBps, the drive already starts off with low expectations, and there is not much to write home about.

Today we will present you our second portable SSD from Crucial, which is available on the market since a few weeks ago. The portable SSD is simply called X8, and it’s one of the fastest portable SSD we can buy in stores. It also offers huge capacities up to 2TB, and support for all devices with USB connections, including PC, MacOS, PS4 and Xbox One. Housed within the casing is essentially a Crucial P1 SSD with modified firmware. The P1 is Crucial’s entry-level NVMe SSD that is powered by a Silicon Motion SM2263EN controller and features Micron’s 1TB 64L QLC NAND. Because QLC NAND has slow direct to flash speeds, Micron programmed in a dynamic pseudo-SLC write cache to speed up write performance. And, since the X8 is a portable device, the firmware on the internal SSD needed to be modified to suit the tasks, so, Crucial made the write cache a bit larger. The X6 supports both UASP and TRIM - the two main things to look out for when dealing with SATA SSDs behind a USB bridge. We haven’t seen an SSD of any type drop to that low of a write rate in several years, basically since the dawn of TLC. Note, too, that this was the 1TB capacity drive. The 500GB model will likely drop out of cache at the 90GB mark.MB/s speed measured as maximum sequential performance of device as measured by Crucial on a high performance desktop computer with Crystal Disk Mark (version 6.0.2 for x64). Your performance may vary. Comparative speed claims measured as maximum sequential performance of similarly situated portable SSDs, mainstream portable HDDs and mainstream USB flash drives from vertically-integrated manufacturers selling under their own brands as of June 2019. Latest firmware may be required for operation. For more information, see https://crucial.com/support/x8 Despite TRIM not being explicitly mentioned in the CrystalDiskInfo report, we were able to activate it on the X8. Otherwise, the reported S.M.A.R.T attributes are similar to the ones obtained for the other external SSDs in the same class. Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology On the NVMe-class drives front, CrystalDiskInfo provides the following information. NVMe-Class External Drives Information From a performance viewpoint, the X6 and X8 fall under different categories that are referred to here on as SATA-class and NVMe-class. Under the SATA-class devices, the Crucial Portable SSD X6 is pitted against the following external SSDs that were reviewed earlier:

We previously reviewed the Crucial X6 2TB portable SSD, which made a good impression on us, so there is a high expectation on the X8 model to perform better. To test this, I used AS SSD's copy benchmark, which involves transferring three different file types from my OS drive to the X8 – an ISO folder consisting of two large files, a programs folder with lots of little files, and finally a game folder that’s made up of both big and small files. Plug the Crucial X8 Portable SSD into your PS4 or Xbox One and expand your gaming world. With up to 2TB of storage, you’ll spend less time deleting files and more time in the game.

The Crucial X8 also edged ahead of the T7 Touch in AS SSD's traditional 1GB 4K random speed test, too. It couldn't quite match the peerless speeds of the T5, admittedly - if only because, much like the T7 Touch, switching to USB-C made absolutely no difference to the overall speed of the drive in this instance - but it still came pretty damn close, managing a random write speed of 37.7MB/s and a random read speed of 23.8MB/s. The latter is pretty much equal with the T5's 23.2MB/s result, but the T5's random write speed of 40.7MB/s still remains the fastest result I've seen so far for an external SSD. The Crucial X8 flew past the Samsung T7 Touch when I moved over to USB-C as well, completing the ISO test in an even nippier 562MB/s (1.91 seconds), the Program test in 297MB/s (4.73 seconds), and the Game test in 420MB/s (3.29 seconds). Compare that to the T7 Touch's results of 501MB/s (2.14 seconds) for the ISO, 128MB/s (10.96 seconds) for the Program and 325MB/s (4.25 seconds) for the Game test and the Crucial X8 has it beaten hands down. iPadOS 13 required for the Crucial X8 to work with iPad Pro devices with USB-C port. For more information, see https://crucial.com/support/x8

Let’s start with some technical data and product features while later, we will show more interesting test results. Inside, Crucial uses 64-layer QLC NAND allied to a four-channel Silicon Motion SM2263 controller bridging over to USB. X8 opts to include the version using DDR4 memory – there is another relying on the Host Memory Buffer (HMB) interface for buffering duties – but do appreciate sequential speed is capped at 10Gbps, even though the controller and NAND can run faster in a PCIe-attached M.2 NVMe environment. Compatibility may vary and may be contingent on device formatting and host capabilities. For more information, see https://crucial.com/support/x8 Unleash your creative energy in the field with the Crucial X8 portable SSD and Apple’s iPad Pro. Add up to 2TB of capacity to your tablet instantly. Curate, edit, and export multi-stream video without your computer or an internet connection. Seamlessly works with popular video-editing software like LumaFusion.is a juicy number when it comes to holding lots of games, and there’s no reason why you can’t do this on last-gen consoles and for ever-growing Steam libraries.