Crucial X8 2TB Portable SSD – Up to 1050MB/s – PC and Mac
Crucial X8 2TB Portable SSD – Up to 1050MB/s – PC and Mac – USB 3.2 External Solid State Drive – CT2000X8SSD9
- Some of the storage capacity is used for formatting and other purposes and is not available for data storage. 1GB equals 1 billion bytes.
- Compatibility may vary and may be contingent on device formatting and host capabilities.
- Compatible Android devices must be able to work with USB Mass Storage over OTG. Operating system updates and reformatting may be required.
- iPadOS 13 required for the Crucial X8 to work with iPad devices with USB-C port.
| Weight: | 100 g |
| Dimensions: | 11 x 1.15 x 5.3 cm; 100 Grams |
| Brand: | Crucial |
| Model: | CT2000X8SSD9 |
| Colour: | Black |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | Crucial |
| Dimensions: | 11 x 1.15 x 5.3 cm; 100 Grams |
5.0 out of 5 stars Connects and works without issues
I bought this to archive my drone videos so I could connect it to my TV to show them. Not only does it connect to the TV but works equally as well with my Mac Mini and my iPad Air !
Crucial are a good well know make and this SSD represents very good value for money.
5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to set up
Needed an external drive so I can transfer and work on my projects on both my computers. This fits the job, it is lightweight and has all the storage I need. Easy to set up, just plug in and format to Mac OS as it is default to exfat. Transfer speed seems ok
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Storage
Needed to backup loads of old photos from a small usb, was concerned the usb would fail so purchased this hard drive. Was the best value for money at the time of purchase and wow its so fast! Putting files onto it was a breeze compared to the old usb flash drive storage i was using before.
4.0 out of 5 stars Speed some of the time
I’ve been using the drive for a couple of months. It definitely does have the characteristics stated in the I’m depth reviews…it can run out of steam when doing large data writes. I had read the reviews so got what I expected, make sure this is the drive for you though….4TB for 150 was about right when I bought this
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelle
This has really been useful. I got this at the reduced price on Prime Day. But even at the full price its worth it. Super fast transfer speeds, ultra compact and comes with a good quality usb c cable. No compatibility issues with M2 Macbook Pro. Able to upload large files almost instantly.
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfectly fast and compac
Took me a while to get it to run at full speed, but once i had the right cable setup it absolutely performs.
The minor issues with the cable that came with it were maybe my pc’s usb/usb c slots, but with adapters and trying things it worked fine and as fast as its supposed to.
The hard drive was physically smaller than I imagined and it’s size and the fact it is so lightweight is such a great bonus as it is easy to carry if I need to take it to the office with me and also for just putting away when I’m not using it.
I am OK with tech but this was so simple to use, I think anyone who charges/uses a phone could work out what to do with it easily.
I used it to free up space both on my Windows laptop and on my Samsung S10 phone and it is a game-changer! Both were screaming notifications at me to say I was low on storage, but this tiny little hand sized gadget has meant I’ve got much more room on both devices AND with 1TB space, there is still PLENTY of storage available on the external hard drive. Very happy!
Lots of ps4 games have ps5 updates but can still be played from External H.D/SSD Mass effect L.E, Need4speed remastere(d put graphics to maximum & turn off motion blur for 4k/60fps)
C.o.d modern warfare 2019(campaign 4k/60 locked), Last of us part 2,
God of war1, Horizon1, Far cry 5,
Days gone, Shadow of the tomb raider,
Ratchet & clank 2016 4k/60, Infamous second son & first light run locked 60fps go into settings, Ni no kuni 2 dynamic 4k locked 60fps go into settings
Bought for extra storage for my Xbox series X. You can’t play the made for Xbox series X games directly from the SSD but you can move them back and forward between the internal and external storage at blazing fast speeds. I bought the X8 on prime day saving 20% on the price and I could not be more pleased. Plug and play, format as storage when prompted and hey presto. I had considered the expansion card but at nearly 200 it’s just not viable.
I have a couple of these, both the 4tb and the 2tb….
They’re great, speeds as advertise, able to edit 4k 10bit footage on them (gh6, m1 macbook) on Premier with no issues…..
BUUUUUUUT.
It gets hot, hotter than any other ssd…..not sure if that will be a issue in the longer term…
(but I’ve had the 2tb version for about a year…. And it works great…. Other than getting hot)
..and it runs cool, unlike the one I put together myself a few months ago which is hot when idle. Write/read speed not as advertised but still really decent. Big GB files are transferred in seconds. It has a solid brush metal casing with rounded edges that feel great in the hand. It can take a bit of rough handling judging by the condition of the packaging when it arrived.
I’ve been looking for a 2TB external backup disk for some time, to replace a 1.5TB spinny disk that’s started to make expensive sounding noises. Being a tightwad, I didn’t want to spend more than 100 on one, preferably a lot less.
This came up on Prime Day for around 77. It has USB C/Thunderbolt connection, ideal for my Mac which is much faster than the normal USB 3 connection. I don’t really need a fast connection for a backup disk but at this price it’s a bonus. For the same sort of money I could have bought a no-name Chinese NVMe drive with an equally anonymous enclosure with an USB 3 connector, instead I opted for an external drive made by a well-known manufacturer with a 3 year warranty. Bit of a bargain, if you ask me 🙂
Bought this as it was on a special price – 96. For 2TB, this was too good to be true. Sure, it’s not like some fancy NVMe drive in your machine, but it’s a really well optimised product in my view – it’s smaller than an M2 or NVMEe drive in a USB case, it’s very slight, light and in use doesn’t warm up as I had expected it to. It’s reasonable to assume that this means it must be pretty energy efficient whic is also good.
Not sure what you have to do to get thge claimed speeds, I didn’t get anywhere nesr that, but it was plenty fast enough. You also get access to the crucial clone software which I found very effective. I was returning a machine for a screen repair, so cloned the PC internal drive to the crucial drive, then after plugging it into my other PC’s USB 3 port, was able to run from the crucual drive as the main drive for a week while my PC was repaired. The whole process was seamless and was a lot quicker (to clone) than I was expecting.
Recommended!
As one might be able to vaguely see in the pic I have paired mine with an Xbox Series X and it works flawlessly.
At the start I was only storing there games that do not require the fast internal Xbox SSD. I still use it for that and it is fast.
But as you xan see it can also he used to transfer massive games at about 2Gbps so now I also store X|S games there, it only takes a few minutes to copy 100GB of data so I typically have a lot of games downloaded and ready to go in a tiny fraction of the time it would take to download them.
It is rugged, doesn’t need disconnecting when not in use, plug and forget. Very happy with the purchase.
Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and light enough to take it wherever you want [something you’re usually limited on if you’re used to the bigger/bulkier hard-drives]. Bang for buck, this was perfect for me – it is quick enough to run media libraries through Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro and I’ve not noticed any dramatic slow-downs/random crashes on either of those apps.
So far, it’s been reliable, dependable and if portability is your primary concern [which it was for me], look no further. I’ve been using this for almost a month now and I’ve not had any issues with it. Also, the supplied USB-C to USB-C cable is pretty good too! I wish my other external HD’s were also USB-C!
Bought to help an old MacBook for video editing and use with m1 iPad Pro. Drive is excellent and works seamlessly between 2 devices. Setup required quick reformat and then good to go. Fast read/write as I wanted.
I liked the idea of 1 cable with old style usb adapter (1 less cable in a house full of them). When using the adapter on old MacBook, the connection drops if I move and drive ejects. I mostly use laptop on lap, so this is annoying. And inevitable that something I have open will go screwy. So I guess I’ll test some more cables ……
This is a sleek, well-built product that works well but I do have one issue and that is, although the drive is fast, is is not really near to the advertised speeds so in that light it could be considered expensive.See disk speed images of my MAC accessing its own drive and also the X8 – best of 3 attempts (to demonstrate the slower speed is not down to my system). Bear in mind the advertised drive speed is up to 1050MB/s. I used the cable supplied with the drive (no adapter needed). Overall, I’m very pleased with this drive but wish the speed were closer to that advertised.
Heads up for Windows users – the product comes preformatted as ExFAT, which is to ensure compatibility with non-Windows products (PlayStation etc) but it’s dreadfully slow especially when copying/reading/even deleting small files. If you reformat was NTFS the problem will be solved.
Pro tip:
If you are using an old style USB socket and get the included cable adaptor orientation backwards then your drive will run 100 times slower than it should!! There is a small notch on the adaptor and this must be lined up with the same notch on the cable or the performance will be terrible.
I nearly returned the item thinking it was complete junk until I googled the problem and found an article on the manufacturers website. It isn’t described in the included leaflet and its quite unusual to have reversible connectors that shouldn’t be reversed.
I thought that the speed of reading and writing would be faster. In fact, reading is about 100-200 Mb / s, writing is highly dependent on the content. can be from 20 to 200 Mb/s. I checked reading and writing through the included USB C cable on the laptop’s SSD. Maybe I did not take into account some weak links when transferring data. In general, the purchase is satisfactory.
I bought this for extra storage and back-up to take in the field when travelling. It works equally well. The product is very durable, robust, and has a USB C interface. This is heavier than a Samsung T5 but is a sturdy product. Only the speed of 1050Mbps prevent me given it 5 stars but for the job it needs to do, it’s a good product.
It does what it is supposed to do, record data on an SSD at good speeds; it is handy being small and portable. I can only hope it lasts longer than some of my HDDs lasted. To-date I am very happy with it.
Does get hot but this is normal apparently. As others have said, this is a lower tier SSD hence the price so it’s using a cache to simulate fast write speeds which may drop after a few mins. That’s fine for my purposes. Did a full backup of my 2/3 full 500gb MacBook Pro disk in about 30 mins and an incremental backup a few weeks later in about 2 mins using Carbon Copy Cloner. Good option for my purposes.
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.
Like a lot of people I own a modern MacBook Pro (mine is the 2018 15″ version which has 4 x Thunderbolt 3 ports), which you are totally scalped if you want more than 256GB of flash storage. I upgraded from a 2012 MacBook Pro, so really missed the capacity of the SATA SSD I had upgraded that to. I bootcamp my Macs too, which exacerbates the problem. Unlike the old MacBook Pros, the internal storage on modern ones aren’t user upgradeable, which is where this beauty comes in!
I was lucky enough to wait (and WAIT!) for the price to drop around Black Friday, so I got the 1TB model for not much more than the normal price of the 500GB model. I’m so chuffed my patience paid off.
The packaging is normal Crucial minimalistic and environmentally friendly other than the plastic the SSD is wrapped in.
Inside the box you get:
The Crucial X8 SSD
A user manual
A dual purpose cable
The SSD itself is a really lovely and tactile design. Other than two slim plastic inserts for branding and model/serial information it’s all black anodised aluminium. It measures 110mm x 53mm x 10mm and weights a svelte 100g. Whilst it’s silent in operation (no moving parts), it does get toasty, particularly under load. I haven’t experienced any thermal throttling, so hopefully the aluminium case is enough of a heat sink to keep the M.2 NVME SSD inside. It has one single port, which is a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C.
The only thing about the design I don’t like is the fact there is no activity/power light. You just have to trust your computer that it’s ejected properly prior to removal.
The supplied dual purpose cable is a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C, with a converter from Type C to Type A. This is a great addition and allows backwards compatibility to devices with USB 3.1 and below. The USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C interface is rated up to 10Gbits/s or 1.25GB/s.
The Crucial X8 is rated at 1050 MB/s read speed by Crucial, and in testing it’s not far off that. The Blackmagic Disk Speed test gave constant results of around 950 MB/s read and 925 MB/s write. Similar results were given in Windows 10 using AS SSD. It sure is quick! The only way you would exceed these speeds would be with an SSD using the Thunderbolt 3 interface to its full potential. Drives using Thunderbolt 3 cost FAR more than the Crucial X8, and unless you spend your whole life transferring huge files I’m not sure the extra cost would justify the real-world benefit.
My drive is partitioned into two, one partition is for bootcamp with Windows 10; the other partition is a shared data expansion for Windows and macOS formatted as exFAT.
Booting from the Crucial X8 is actually quicker and more responsive than my desktop PC which has a SATA SSD, and FAR quicker than my retired 2012 MacBook Pro.
As you can probably tell from the above, I’m extremely happy with my purchase. It’s not that often that all my expectations are met, or exceeded with a tech product, but on this occasion, the Crucial X8 ticks all the boxes.