Crucial X6 500GB Portable SSD – Up to 540MB/s – PC and Mac
Crucial X6 500GB Portable SSD – Up to 540MB/s – PC and Mac – USB 3.2 USB-C External Solid State Drive – CT500X6SSD9
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: | 39.5 g |
| Dimensions: | 6.9 x 1.1 x 6.4 cm; 39.5 Grams |
| Brand: | Crucial |
| Model: | CT500X6SSD9 |
| Colour: | Black |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | Crucial |
| Dimensions: | 6.9 x 1.1 x 6.4 cm; 39.5 Grams |
The performance does soon noticeably slow down when running the initial, large, full backup. But subsequent incremental backups are smaller and transfer speeds remain fast.
If I recall correctly Macrium, based on the data size and initial transfer speed, initially expected it to take 90 minutes but once the drive’s transfer speed slowed down it revised this to over 5 hours to complete. This is still much faster than using an HDD.
Roughly speaking, the performance bottleneck is due to the less expensive “buffering” capability, if this is a problem for you then you will need the faster, more expensive versions.
Great for singular stuff, not so good for bulk transfers
Like many other reviewers I found the lead to be almost ridiculously short but it was just, and I do mean just, long enough for my purposes. I was very pleased to find that the time taken to copy the files across was also short.
Performed a similar task with a USB flash drive a while back. I expect some of you are laughing now and rightly so. What was I thinking? Took about an hour for every minute the task took with this little beauty. Money well spent!
Really impressed! Very small as you can see (that’s a 5p) super fast and seem very well made.
One thing I will say is you might need a usb c the old standard usb converter as this only has usb c (converter cost 2ish) and you might need to change the format of the drive as I did -no need sue as it’s super fast!
All in all very impressed!
Works well with Xbox, been in use for several months with no issues at all and read/write seems a lot quicker than platter drive it replaced.
The last time I bought anything like this was a few years ago and I am so impressed at how small and fast this is for the money.
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.
My complaint is about delivery. It is stated that this product was put in or letter box. It wasn’t. The driver could not even be bothered to open a gate and come to the house. Instead he threw it though the gate where it was rained upon for some time. Luckily the product was undamaged and works well. Please instruct your drivers how to deliver goods. This is not the first time this has happened.
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.
Read and Write speeds are nice and quick, build quality is good, can’t complain.
I’ve had no issues using it.
You can track the progress of external drives by comparing ones purchases over the last few years.
I have a Maxtor external hard drive, which requires a power supply and is the size of a slim brick. After that I have a Toshiba external hard drive which is a quarter of the size and gets its power via the USB socket.
Now the Crucial 1TB drive is an eighth of the size and is powered by its USB-C connection.
At each step above the storage capacity has increased, the physical size of the drive has gone down and the price has also gone down considerably.
The Crucial drive loads quickly and data storage speeds are excellent.
What’s not to like.
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.
I’m seriously thinking about getting more of these – they’re so small and easy to carry around.
4TB is an incredible amount of storage to have on something that is so small & light. You could be walking around with 4/5 of these things & not really feel it. I’m really impressed with the price as well – very reasonable considering most large storage portable SSDs aren’t cheap.
I’m hoping that, because it’s an SSD, it should have a long life!
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!
Convenient and quick transfer with huge storage for my video. If it had wireless capability it would be even better.
Very compact and lightweight. Super fast transfer, even with large files, videos, photos etc.
Expensive but so far so good, no faults. Comes with a type c end to end, you just need to get a female type c to a usb type for pcs, other than that works well. Good buy
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.
Its small size means it fits easily into my small camera bag when I need to take it with me, great transfer speeds and very good value for money. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.
This drive is perfect for extending the storage on a PS4, especially if you get it with the Crucial USB-C to USB-A adapter like I did as the PS4 doesn’t have a USB-C port.
The PS4 instantly recognises the drive. In system menu, choose devices option and you format the drive for use as an extended storage drive. It takes seconds to do and it’s ready to go. As you can see from my screenshot it shows 918.4GB available for use.
The drive transfers data fast and I highly recommend it.
Replacement to faulty portable drive.
Very easy to set up.
Speeds good so far.
Used to store back up files, photos etc.
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.
The negative: It seems the drive has 64 GB fast storage and the rest is slower. So restoring a 400GB backup went fast for a long time then went down to about 80MB/sec. In normal operation this will very rarely be noticeable. Stop copying and it goes back to the old fast speed for a while.
And the absolute positive: The price. This drive with 2TB is about the same as others with 1TB. So overall 5 stars for having twice the capacity as other drives for the same price, and slowing down after a while for a huge copy operation.
This SSD is so small, fitting easily within the palm of my hand! Furthermore, it’s “plug in and play” making it the perfect travel companion for your laptop.
With that said, I do want to point that whilst the read/write speeds are decent; the performance does drop quite a bit when a multitude of large files are being transferred, so it starts fast then slows down quite a bit, just something to bare in mind.
Great value for money, I would definitely recommend.
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.