2TB Crucial X8 Portable Solid State Drive EXPIRED

Awesome deal!

Wish it had password protection. Anyone know how to password protect it? Thanks.

QLC drive I believe, if that matters to you.

Quote from ghostfreckle : Awesome deal! Wish it had password protection. Anyone know how to password protect it? Thanks.

Use VeraCrypt...
https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=veracrypt

Quote from seywhut : Use VeraCrypt... https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=veracrypt

Thanks. I'll check it out.

Quote from Dirtyharryy : Mediocre speeds for SSD Slow transferring large files gets very hot 🔥

Faster than old ssds and way faster than external hdd. I'm just using it for storage of personal files.

I have this. It sucks ass. Don't get it. Runs hot all the time, even when not doing anything. Uses so much power, it's flakey on all but my Raspberry Pi 4's USB port. Slower than an HDD once the cache is used up. Just fuhgettabout it...

Quote from ed31337 : I have this. It sucks ass. Don't get it. Runs hot all the time, even when not doing anything. Uses so much power, it's flakey on all but my Raspberry Pi 4's USB port. Slower than an HDD once the cache is used up. Just fuhgettabout it...

Real insightful review… Despite thermals (something that appears to be redundant with many portable ssds) all objective reviews appear to counter your point of it "sucking ass". Appears to have faster write/read speeds across the board (1.5-2x faster) compared to SATA equivalent counterparts with the caveat of it using QLC tech (newer cheaper nvme storage solution yielding less write lifespan compared to tlc but not functionally noticeable to average use case). As with all things YMMV do your own research, but don't take keyboard warriors verbatim as this is a great price point for what it offers in performance.

Quote from Dirtyharryy : Mediocre speeds for SSD Slow transferring large files gets very hot 🔥

Quote from ed31337 : I have this. It sucks ass. Don't get it. Runs hot all the time, even when not doing anything. Uses so much power, it's flakey on all but my Raspberry Pi 4's USB port. Slower than an HDD once the cache is used up. Just fuhgettabout it

I have the 1TB version and it hits 900+MB/s with my Macbook, pretty sure this is consider fast for the price. And I don't like to keep the drive near my body while it is writing. I have 2 Samsung T5 which run half the speed and they get hot too.. so what better drive do you guys recommend with the same capacity, similar speed and below $200. Please enlighten us

Quote from keung : I have the 1TB version and it hits 900+MB/s with my Macbook, pretty sure this is consider fast for the price.

How full is it? As long as you're only doing small enough writes that don't exceed the cache or cause thermal throttling, yeah these can be very fast. But if you go outside that, speed goes sharply downhill. QLC bleh.

If you have it hooked up to a USB port that can't quite provide the necessary power, things run real wonky too. On my HP Pavillion laptop, the thing works, but there is a noticable delay at the beginning of each write operation. On my powered USB 2.0 hub, it doesn't even work enough to be used reliably. None of my USB HDDs or SATA to USB connected SSD's have such problems on these ports.

Quote from keung : And I don't like to keep the drive near my body while it is writing.

Yeah, I can't imagine doing that with this either.

But really, writing hot wouldn't have been a problem for me IF the thing could idle cool. I live in AZ. During the summer, I really don't want any unnecessary heat building up in my house.

Quote from keung : I have 2 Samsung T5 which run half the speed and they get hot too..

Hmm, good to know. I'll stay away from those in the future. Thx.

Quote : so what better drive do you guys recommend with the same capacity, similar speed and below $200. Please enlighten us

I've been very happy with a Samsung 860 EVO SSD paired with an Asmedia ASM1153 USB to SATA adapter. Runs completely cool to the touch for me. Maybe just slightly warm if I do a lot of disk activity. Been very reliable so far everywhere I've plugged it in. I use this daily, while the X8 2TB sits on a shelf gathering dust.

The reviews seem okay to me. For someone who's on a budget I can't see why this isn't a good deal, especially if your not writing very large files. It's probably not a great long-term backup solution, nor is it ideal for editing 4k video off of, but I don't know, if you have an iMac with thunderbolt ports (2017 and later for the 27", I believe, have TB) and say 512gb of internal storage, and you need to increase your storage capacity and want to keep this thing permanently attached in the back, what the hell; why not? It seems perfect for that. Obviously you'll want to backup all your files to a different external drive, but after you do that you can probably do much worse than using this to increase your storage by this amount, for this price. I do agree though that after you exceed whatever the cache limit is, 13gb I think I read, at a time, then this thing apparently will not perform well at all. But honestly, how many of us who are looking at this drive are doing that?

Warning: as of about 6 months ago this drive did not work as a PS4 or PS5 external drive. I bought one then and found that the drive would have to be repaired every time you woke the console from rest mode. This was despite being listed by Crucial as ps4/5 compatible at that time. This was not an issue with my particular drive; I researched after the fact and the problem was universal.

I just did a quick search and didn't see any indication this issue has been fixed. It's possible it has and I'm not seeing it, but research first if you're thinking about buying for that purpose.

Quote from ed31337 : while the X8 2TB sits on a shelf gathering dust.

How much you want for it?

People didn't read reviews at all.

QLC is certainly worse, but the X8 has a massive SLC cache, far more than most at this pricepoint or even above. The X6 is the problematic one as it has a small SLC cache. This is one of the best QLC drives out there since the cache is so large that most will never even go beyond it and suffer the QLC performance drop. Most TLC drives will actually perform similar or worse than this on normal workloads because they have smaller SLC caches.

For game drives or most use cases, you'll either rarely or never use up the SLC cache, so you won't run into the direct to QLC performance drop. You have to write over 256gb continuously to saturate the cache. Unless you're transferring more than that, this drive will be fine for you.

If you're doing video writes or something that uses more than that frequently, you probably already know that you shouldn't be looking at something like this.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16...-onthego/6