Crucial X6 4TB Portable SSD – Up to 800MB/s – PC and Mac
Crucial X6 4TB Portable SSD – Up to 800MB/s – PC and Mac – USB 3.2 USB-C External Solid State Drive – CT4000X6SSD9
1. Some of the storage capacity is used for formatting and other purposes and is not available for data storage. 1GB equals 1 billion bytes. Not all capacities available at initial launch.
2. Up to 6.5ft/2 m without impact to data on drive on a carpeted floor.
3. Compatibility may vary and may be contingent on device formatting and host capabilities.
4. 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.
| Weight: | 40.5 g |
| Dimensions: | 6.9 x 1.1 x 6.4 cm; 40.5 Grams |
| Brand: | Crucial |
| Model: | CT4000X6SSD9 |
| Colour: | Black |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | Crucial |
| Dimensions: | 6.9 x 1.1 x 6.4 cm; 40.5 Grams |
Great Tiny 2T SSD
Bought one of these as a Time Machine backup drive and promptly bought another as a travel backup as it’s so small. Great value 2TB SSD and comes with a short USB-C to USB-C cable.
Tiny but powerful
Bought this to use for art files on my iPad. Really surprised at how sturdy it is! I love how small it is too, makes it easy to carry and store! Highly recommend
Perfect drive
I bought this as a back up drive for my PC. I was surprised how small it is but that made it easier to place out of the way. Cable supplied as others have said is short but wasn’t a problem. Worked perfectly ,would recommend to any prospective buyer.
Not as fast as it claims
Great bit of kit but I cant get the transfer speeds it claims. It could just be my processor / memory is slow. I am going from SSD to SSD. Otherwise wonderful.
For £99 this thing is an absolute no braine
I’ve usually stuck with mainstream SSDs in a USB 3 caddy, and that’s worked fine, still does.
But for 99, 2TB and a device that’s half the size and weights practically nothing, plus USB 3.2, this drive is a bargain.
I’ve brought several for use on Windows PCs, Macs, Linux and Android phones and they work a treat.
Data speeds are excellent for small device, easily transferring around 30GB in just less than a min (using Thunderbolt 3 on Mac, you’re mileage may vary).
Other than Samsung, who is still my go to for internal drives, I’m happy to recommend and use Crucial. So far their solid state drives seem robust and reliable, more so than WD I’ve been testing.
Nice and compac
Looks really good and you can fit it almost anywhere, my only problem is that sometimes the transfer speeds can decrease randomly, whether its because the thing gets too hot, or because im using a different cable (which says it can handle the ssd), idk
I’ve owned this item over a year and a half and have used this item extensively so I hope this review is helpful to people considering buying. Firstly, this item is extremely reliable and I’ve never had any problems with it whatsoever. It does exactly what you would want this item to do. There has been no connection issues, and I’ve used this device with mac and pc without formatting it between uses and there has been zero problems. Speeds are extremely fast. Via thunderbolt 4 it’s close to the max 1000mb/s, I’d guess 900mb/s. And via usb 3.0 around 400mb/s. Via thunderbolt 4 I can edit 4K videos directly off this SSD, with no issues at all. In addition, I’m a very unorganised person so often I throw this item in my bag with little care, and I often forget to properly eject this SSD and there’s been no issues. I definitely don’t have to baby this item it just does the job. I’d say get this over a Sandisk SSD, the Sandisk one I had corrupted. If you do video editing or anything where your dealing with file sizes that are more often than not in gigabytes rather than megabytes, I’d say it’s worth getting at least a 2tb SSD if you can afford it. But if you can only afford the 1tb SSD you’ll be very happy with it. I’ll be buying another one of these soon. Very positive review, thought I’d come back over a year later to show my appreciation for this product that has served me well.
As an occasional journalist needing to store several thousand photos, I needed a decent capacity SSD that would be unaffected by occasional jostling. This unit fulfilled the requirement perfectly; easy to use, fast to load and retrieve from, and a very competitive price. Just about perfect for me.
It’s tiny! Got on recommendation from my BIL. Thought it was expensive but gave it a go. I’ve backed up my laptop and photos. It’s a little fiddly to set up and transfer (tbf I didn’t really follow the online instructions which was given on the pamplet and was not as simple for a layperson) but once set up, it was easy to move things around
Good storage in a small package.
4TB capacity is a good size for a portable SSD but it’s slow to download large files. Works fine on our TV, without stutter while watching movies but does gets warm as you might expect after extended use.
I was a bit sceptical at first, given the fact that this little device is much cheaper than the competition.
But once I set it up – which was very straightforward- all doubts vanished. It’s compact and very easy to carry around, and the storage capacity is great. What else can you ask for?
Excellent back up in a compact package
I take a lot of photos, and whilst my best jpegs are backed up online, my raw files are backed up on external drives. My experience of this tiny solid state drive was that it was easy to install and that files downloaded as if they were on my laptop. With no moving parts it’s difficult for much to go wrong with it, and I was so pleased with it that I bought another – usually I buy different drive makes to diversify storage in case there is a product issue, but this doesn’t apply here.
I got this for my Playstation 5. It was a requirement for a minimum of about 500Mb/s and this does 800. Slower than the 1000 plus you can get in some SSDs, but more than enough for my use case: Saving PS4 games in an external drive that is fast enough to run the games directly from it without having to copy them back into the main PS5 SSD. Unless you get a stop watch out, you will barely notice any difference between internal of external storage for PS4 games on a PS5. For PS5 games, these can be stored on this drive, but not played directly from it (This is Sony limitation, nothing to do with this drive) but transfer speeds are very fast, so it’s also useful for offloading excess games onto external storage without having to worry about the (much longer) time required to re-install from disk or download etc.
I generally prefer to comment, months or years after usage but Amazon does not allow me review if I do not do it when i get the review mail, here it goes:
The ssd does not meet up to the read/write speed claimed by Crucial. That said, it does not mean it is slow, far from it, the read write speed are just not constant.
Sometimes it breezes through huge files, other times its other personality comes out and it behaves like a hdd (speed wise).
Still faster than a HDD.
If anything, it’s a little too lightweight for it’s own good. It just flaps around as an appendage on the laptop, held in place only by it’s connector. Oh, it turns out I *needed* the USB adaptor for my acer aspire 5. Good call on my part, there. Fortunately for me, the lappie has a permanent home on the living room table, so, apart from my constantly making sure the connector is firmly plugged in, no issues for me.
When initially purchased, it was dog slow doing downloads. Seems to have picked up a bit now, tho. Software update?? Anyway, it isn’t joking about 4TB. Finally have everything I want in my steam games library available again. Bought it for Starfield, if truth be told. Very odd for it to require an SSD as part of the minimum spec. But we’ll see how it goes.
5.0 out of 5 stars Small but mighty!
This little gadget is excellent
and was recommended to me. I now recommend to to everyone!
5.0 out of 5 stars A great purchase
I have stored all my videos and photos and it is been working great. I like the fast speed, how small and light it is.
5.0 out of 5 stars Reliable
It’s early days since I purchase this, but It’s been reliable and convenient so far.
Tiny and fas
Couldn’t believe how small and light this SSD is and transfer speed is excellent- so much faster than a USB stick. It’s a bit plasticky so I hope it proves to be reliable and long lasting.
No spinning disk
After a couple of standard hard drive failures, where nothing could be recovered, have decided to go with a SSD with no moving parts. I hope it works out and at the moment seems like a good idea, and I now don’t worry about a failure – never had a problem with an internal SSD. Living in hope.
Wow! Just wow!
I’ve always bought Crucial memory chips so when I saw this tiny thing, I bought it straight away. I am delighted that I did. Plugged it into my MacBook Pro and now I have huge storage. It really is tiny and exceedingly well made. You could, if you so wished, put 15 of them in your pocket! Absolutely brilliant!
Works great with rekordbox
Bought to dj with using rekordbox needed to format to master boot record on Mac to get it to work but was then fine and is blazing fast at exporting using rekordbox software
It is a fine piece of kit for 92 (2023-05), but read the questions first!
* When you write a lot of data at once, it will slow down to almost USB2 speeds. That is the cost saving deal.
* You will want a USB3 data cable. With USB2 the read performance will be greatly restricted.
5.0 out of 5 stars Still new but does just the job
I wanted SSD over HDD and this fitted the bill ….stores what I want ..not cheap but efficie
5.0 out of 5 stars Just grea
Pretty good for the 95 they ask for the 2TB version
It’s surprisingly small and light, I can put it in my jeans pocket easily.
5.0 out of 5 stars Small, fast, reliable
Great product. Very small and compact, big storage capacity, very fast, totally silent and seems to be very reliable.
It works well
I’ve been using the SSD for a couple of mo this and it has been working just fine, I don’t have the best devices but it’s fast enough for me. The only thing is that I can only save and edit files while using Windows, the Mac reads it but I can’t save or edit anything in it.
It's quick, light, and sleek!
It arrived in person much smaller than I anticipated, and since it’s an SSD, there are no risks to dropping it (not that I’d recommend it). I’ve been using it to carry my large, important project files on the go so I can program everywhere I go and save my progress. This SSD is a wonder. I hope the technology gets even cheaper with time!
The Crucial X6 is tiny, comes with cables but no case which was disappointing. Connecting it to my computer and comparing it to an HDD works at least 5x faster which is impressive. Went for 2Tb as many TV etc don’t recognise bigger devices.
You will definitely get the advertised speed if you use USB 3.2 port. However, when transferring a huge number of files, you may get lower speed. These devices have small fast storage and large slow storage. Thus, you will get the advertised speed with a benchmarking tool. It is a value for money. I store all my games on this drive instead of my 256MB NVME gen 5. The games works without any stutter or any other issue. Of course, your PC also needs to be good for playing games from these SSDs.
At less than 100 for a 2TB SSD, this device is very good value. It is very small and ideal for my purposes – full and incremental backups of my Huawei Matebook laptop. As I tend to leave the backups running unattended, ultimate speed is not an absolute requirement. I use Paragon Hard Disk Manager and anyway, a full backup completes in a matter of a few minutes. That’s great.
Reading other reviews, I was aware of the device “features” – in particular that transfer rates decrease greatly with very large data transfers (over ~64GB). I presume this is due to limitations in the device’s front end cache. For my purposes this is not really an issue. Up to this limit, benchmarking shows transfer rates in line with the stated specification.
I use a USB type A port on my Matebook – so I purchased the Crucial USB C to A adapter at 10. I am not over chuffed with that as other SSD manufacturers usually provide both USB A and C cables with the device….
NOTE. There is a notch on the adapter that must be aligned with a corresponding notch on the device USB cable – or transfer rates will suffer dramatically.
My only other minor gripe is that there is no LED “activity” indicator on the SSD – so I can see if anything is happening!
Otherwise, I am reasonably chuffed.
Great storage for those of us forced into the new Apple USB connectio
This is my review of the 2TB model.
I’d like to start by explaining some details of how SSDs work, the best ones (Most expensive ones!) have SLC (Single level Cells) then the next best have DLC (Dual Level Cells), then TLC (Three Level cells) and then there’s QLC (Quad level Cells). SLC drives tend to have a very limited capacity (in the Gigabytes not Terrabytes).
SLC are fastest and most stable. But as you can store less data on them, they cost significantly more. QLC are not very fast at all. Top level SLC based SSDs will have some normal RAM to act as a cache for the data before it gets written to the SLC.
The X8 is QLC based, and has no RAM to act as a cache. It therefore does a little trick where the controller software, will designate some of the QLC storage area as Pseudo SLC, (Caching data in the same was a RAM would) this will give greater speeds until this Cache gets filled up with data waiting for it to be written to the slow QLC. This is why some reviewers mention the drive slowing down so much when copying large amounts of data. (So go for the 2TB drive if you can as it has more cells to use as cache and is less likely to fill up with data, (if it gets full, then it cant do its trick with pseudo cache!).
As for many reports of heat, All flash memory get hot, its a consequence of the memory cells being “Flipped” from off to on or vice versa. Obviously the X8 doesn’t have a fan, instead it uses the case as a heat sink. To aid with this, make sure the X8 is well ventilated if you plan on using it heavily.
So with all that explained, lets move on to my review.
I bought this to use with my M1 Mac mini, now if you have an M1 and aren’t getting the quoted transfer speeds, try connecting the X8 to a Hub or Dock (Thunderbolt 3 or USB 4 would be best) and you should see an increase in speeds. I’m not sure why this happens, but it does.
I use the X8 to store my photo library on and it does a good job, its not as fast as the internal SSD, (But compare the price of a 2TB X8 with a 2TB SSD on a Mac). It is able to use the pseudo cache and gives good speeds.
Basically its a lot of bang for the buck. Its not the fastest drive if you are planning on copying a lot of data. but it works well within the limitations above. Its been totally reliable and its a very portable, very handsome little device.
I recommend it.