The Crucial X8 portable SSD is a solidly built SSD with great performance. Compact enough to fit into your pocket, it comes with an aluminum case with silicone over-molded endcaps for grip and durability. Packing an M.2 NVMe drive inside, it is capable of over 1 GB/s speeds on optimally configured systems. The rive can be connected to laptops with USB-C or traditional USB-A ports.

Performance didn't quite reach that elusive 1050 MB/s, but we did conquer 930MB/s read and 915 MB/s write. Further testing showed solid performance between 64K and 2M file sizes per ATTO. So the Crucial X is a great performer the vast majority of the time, despite the fact that it shows a slow performance off cache. During out large file transfer test, the SSD soon ran out of cache, and the performance suffered 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. Of course, this scenario is extreme and very few cases in real life would require you to transfer such large files or amounts of data to the drive. If you use your external SSD to store large video files such as raw high-resolution, Ultra Blu-rays), Sandisk’s Extreme Portable Pro solution would be a better option.

In any case, price versus performance is very good.

Pros

• Good price
• Fast for everyday operations
• Long warranty and high TBW rating

Cons

• Slows writing off cache to 80MBps