Crucial X9 2TB Portable External SSD – Up to 1050MB/s
Crucial X9 2TB Portable External SSD – Up to 1050MB/s, External Solid State Drive, Works with PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Mac, USB-C 3.2 – CT2000X9SSD902
1. MB/s speed measured by Crucial as maximum sequential performance of device on a high-performance desktop computer with Crystal Disk Mark (version 8.0.4 for x64). Your performance may vary.
2. Some of the storage capacity is used for formatting and other purposes and is not available for data storage. 1GB equals 1 billion bytes.
3. Comparative speed claims measured against maximum reported speeds from mainstream portable HDD manufacturers. Your performance may vary.
4. Up to 7.5 ft/2 meters without impact to data on a carpeted floor.
5. 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.
6. Based on average photo size of 6MB, video at 4K/60fps in H264 format at 24GB/hr and 200GB for AAA games.
7. Best speeds available with USB Type-C to C cable on USB 3.2 Gen2 supported devices. Use USB Type-A adapter for older devices.
8. Ships in exFAT format. Can be reformatted into NTFS, APFS or other formats. Reformatting will result in loss of data from the drive.
9. Three-month complimentary Mylio Photos+ subscription available with eligible Crucial SSD purchase. Mylio Photos+ and Crucial product registration required for redemption. Eligible Crucial X9 SSDs: CT4000X9SSD902, CT2000X9SSD902, CT1000X9SSD902 must be purchased by December 31, 2024. Only new accounts are eligible. Subject to acceptance of applicable Terms of Use, while redemption code supplies last. Additional terms and conditions may apply. Micron Technology reserves the right to change or discontinue this offer at any time without notice.
| Weight: | 32 g |
| Dimensions: | 6.5 x 5 x 1 cm; 32 Grams |
| Brand: | Crucial |
| Model: | CT2000X9SSD902 |
| Manufacture: | Crucial |
| Dimensions: | 6.5 x 5 x 1 cm; 32 Grams |
I bought this to probide a pause and record facility for my Samsung tv. I plugged it in and the tv recognised it and prompted me to format it. This took a short time and it works fine.
Only issue is that the supplied lesd is rather short, but this is a minor matter.
It is small, lightweight and silent, but with a big storage capacity, so it is great for my needs.
Wanted a nice small drive to use with Steam Deck and this has been a great choice. The drive works really weel and is small enough that it can fit on the Deck’s carry case as well so perfect fro travel.
Delighted with this, now being used for backups though I also used it to store photos on holiday transferring from sd via android tablet. Unusually this worked presumably because of the way it came formatted . I gather it’s not quite the latest spec but compared to disc drives it is very fast though usb C must have something to do with this.
First of all I was surprised how small this SSD is – much smaller than the Samsung SSDs I’ve been using up to now. It’s also very fast. I’m getting average read/write speeds of 904/909 MB/s measured using Blackmagic disk speed tests, which is both commendably close to the quoted speeds and about 100 Mb/s faster than the Samsung drives, which I’ve been perfectly happy with. I’ll stick with these X9 drives as I’m not sure whether my setup could get the best out of the more expensive Crucial X10. Time will tell whether the Crucial drives are as reliable as the Samsungs (which have never let me down), but things look good so far.
This storage device exhibits exceptional data transfer speeds when connected to my MacBook. Its compact size and lightweight design make it highly portable. I have not encountered any performance issues thus far.
Had it for close to a year now. Overall, a good SSD. Had a few times when it refused to connect to some MacBooks though. However, it might be just my uni
This drive would get 5 stars if their support tools (for firmware, etc) was available for Silicon processors (Apple M1,M2 and M3).
After forking out for 2 of these, I find out afterwards.
The customer support experience has been less than useful.
Personally? If you’re on the above mentioned machines buy an alternative brand.
Nothing to dislike about this item. Your music that you’ve kept over the years, will now not get lost, so you can continue with peace of mind your stuff is safe and is there always. Works with, PlayStation, X BOX. PC. ETC.
If you’re buying this ssd as extra storage for an xbox series x/s then you’ll also need a USB C to USB 3.1 Gen 2 Cable. This will have a little blue piece at the end of the cable, not white. If you use an older usb c cable (like i did) you will only be able to use the ssd drive for photos and music.
The included cable is usb c to usb c so won’t fit an xbox.
Wish someone had told me this before buying.
What’s good: Very small and fast external SSD – I couldn’t believe how small it was when I opened the package.
What’s bad: I bought this SSD to back up my Mac using Time Machine. Of course there are no instructions enclosed with the unit. So went on the Crucial website. No help there either. In the end I Googled “Back up Mac to Crucial X9” or something similar and found an independent YouTube video that explains the necessary steps. There must be millions of people who want to back up a Mac. Would it kill Crucial to produce some decent user instructions?
In recent days I bought 3 x 1TB portable USB SSDs, this and 2 x Sabrent Rocket Nanos (since out of stock) which have the advantage of having cost over 10 less each and came with both double-ended USB C and USC C to USB A connector leads (the Crucial only has a double-ended USB C). However, the Crucial comes with drive cloning software that the Sabrent lacks. Both options were more competitive than 1TB USB sticks and much faster and more reliable by reputation. Most unfortunate that the Sabrent has become out of stock at the time of writing.
The Crucial X6 is tiny – half the physical size of an external USB SATA drive, but it’s eight times the capacity of my old one (see pic). Some people have complained about slow speed, and so I’ve run some tests using my 4-year-old Windows pc. The fastest is 325 megabytes per second (325MB/s). It’s the same for reads and writes. But this speed is only achieved when copying a single file (such as a compressed folder), and using the short (23cm) cable that came with the X6. There’s nothing to indicate that this cable is anything special, but substituting a longer cable with the same spec reduces the speed to 40MB/s. I get the same speed using a USB A cable rated at 5Gbits per second. The bottom line is that X6 is ideal for media backups – it has high-capacity, it’s faster than a USB stick, and it only costs about 5p per gigabyte.
Bought to replace a standard Western Digital 4tb hard drive that let me down after only 12 months of use. This Crucial SSD is many times faster, absolutely silent and extremely tiny! It sits on my desk and is almost invisible for my day to day work. I’m not bothered about comparing speeds and showing graphs, I just wanted something secure, fast and reliable and this seems to tick all my boxes. It’s very well constructed and just gives the impression of quality and reliability. I’ve got another 2 ‘normal’ external hard drives, with backups of photos and other files, but during this year I’ll be replacing them with a couple of these Crucial drives.
Very tidy little unit and completely painless in use. Just plug in and go!
I bought the 2TB unit which is the obvious choice at the price point (the 4TB is just too expensive) and it holds 1.8TB of data in actuality.
Speed is rated at over 400MB/s by DiskMark (software) but again in real life gives a very steady 325MB/s read and 315MB/s write via the USB 3.0 (Type-C) port on my mini PC, which i’m very happy with for an external drive. Unlike most mechanical drives (and many solid states) the data speed does not dive or jump around, even during huge copy operations, which is both unusual and most excellent!
Like this little drive a lot and may be back for another…. soon!
I got this with the USB adapter to replace my HDD. It’s a massive improvement and compliments my internal SSD. Very fast and no issues. Very surprised at how small and light it is. Great piece of kit. Would buy agai
The reason I tested using the USB 3 adapter is that I got this to connect to my wifi router to use as a home cloud drive, which doesn’t have USB C socket, and it’s working superbly.
It’s effectively replacing my home cloud drive: originally had one of those western digital ‘mycloud’ devices, which has always been quite slow… then wd pulled support for the product leaving owners with a non internet facing home cloud brick as they shut down their servers… then the awful western digital device just fails constantly now, hence investing in this Crucial X6, and it has been an absolute winner in all regards. A perfect replacement.
Being solid state it’s quiet, fast, compact and runs fairly cool even when dumping onto it the complete backup from my original piece of rubbish (never going near WD again by the way).
I’ve had a few Crucial devices in recent years; to name a few… five SATA SSD’s to upgrade laptops, three sets of RAM for laptops, three M3 SSDs to again upgrade storage capacity of laptops… and all have been Crucial and all are still performing to the highest possible standards. Fast and reliable, and this X6 pocket sized gem is doing the same.
For under a hundred quid for the 2TB device it’s a winner all round in my experience, and given my experience with the Crucial brand in recent years I’m pretty certain this one is also going to be a worthwhile investment. Full marks in all regards.
I bought this SSD for around 59 in December and it has been fantastic! I have used to store my files from my Hard Drive as a Backup and I’m really pleased with it. The downside it that the advertised speed is 800MB/s and I only get around 35MB/s transfer speed in Windows 10. Sometimes it gets up to 200MB/s but that’s rare. I have enjoyed this product and it is a good product! It is really reliable. It is going to serve me for years of files! I recommend this if you want to buy a reliable and known brand company to store your data on.
(Also, when you get the SSD, format it first to NTFS because when it comes with ExFAT it is really slow, so make sure to format it before you use it to NTFS.)
Also, was an excellent price in my opinion. Highly recommended.
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.
USB type C’s primary benefit is speed. Type C connections are significantly faster than USB 3 type A connections. Confusingly, the USB naming system changed a few years back to further confound consumers. The basic USB 3.
0 standard now becomes USB 3.2 gen 1. Take note of the Gen. 1 as this is important in terms of overall speed. The Gen. 1 suffix denotes basic USB 3.0 speeds of up to 5 Gigabits – NOT Giga Bytes – per second. Many get confused over Gigabits and Gigabytes, with the latter perhaps being more familiar to people and thus greatly misleading. So many times I’ve seen and heard people say: “Yeah, it’s a one Gigabyte per second speed.” In fact, in order to work out how many Gigabytes per second one Gigabit is, you divide it by eight. So, one Gigabit = 125 megabytes per second. This is vastly slower than a true one Gigabyte per second, given that traditionally 1 Gigabyte = 1,024 Megabytes. Most determine one Gigabit = 1,000 megabytes per second and that’s close enough to not worry about minor naming scheme differences.
Anyway, traditional USB 3, now USB 3.2 gen 1, tops out at 5 Gigabits per second, or, to put it into perhaps more relatable terms, 625 megabytes per second. However, this speed is unattainable as the USB standard has overheads and other design elements that restricts this speed to close to 3.2 Gigabits max throughput.
Still with me? … Great!
Now, using the traditional USB 3 connection via the supplied adaptor, the very best sustainable transfer speeds I’ve seen are around 225 megabytes/sec, or about a quarter the advertised “up to” speed claim. To be fair, I do not have a USB Type C port to connect the drive to. If I did, I suspect performance would increase significantly. bear in mind that although USB type C ports are now becoming more mainstream, it’s likely you won’t have one if your PC is more than three years or so old. The point of all this is to manage expectations as to the performance of this drive. In daily use using a regular USB 3.0/USB 3.2 gen 1 port, I get about twice the transfer speed of my Seagate 1Tb 2.5inch external hard drive which manages a respectable 120 megabytes/second average transfer speed using Windows 10.
For me, the main reason I went for this drive was it’s low price (just 47 at time of purchase) and the fact it was an SSD, and thus had no moving parts. This meant that it was far more robust as a portable device than a traditional hard drive with its spinning platters.
Yes, it’s faster than the old external hard drive, but using regular USB 3.0 type A connections, it’s no speed demon, so don’t expect it to get anywhere close to the touted performance. Of course, the “up to” phrase so often used in advertising is a best case scenario, so buyer beware if you[re purchasing this solely on it’s speed claims.
Otherwise, this is a nicely built drive, feels solid and weightier than I had thought a solid state drive would be. The only other minus here is the ridiculously short included data cable. I don’t know it’s precise length, but it’s approximately a foot (30cm)at best. My tower case PC sees the drive having to dangle from the front mounted port.
Overall, this is a nice, solid external drive that will outperform any mechanical hard drive at this price point. My unit came pre-installed with two files that were links to web pages to, I assume, download the free software from the likes of Acronis and some photo app that I can’t recall the name of. Useless to me, but there all the same for those interested. I believe there is a third file which linksw you to Crucial.
Finally, the drive comes pre-formatted using the X-FAT file system. This is a highly portable file system that will permit use with Mac or PC. Other devices, such as Android tablets etc, may not be able to access an X-FAT formatted drive. However, the unit can easily be re-formatted using NTFS if needed.
Fast, but nowhere near the claimed speeds for probably the majority of users.
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.