Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
You know, when using external storage, the key factor is write performance, whereas read performance is a little less important (IMHO). So here we are, the year is 2019 and a decade ago we were copying our files at 20 maybe 30 MB/sec over a USB Flash drive. Times gave certainly changed into a 100 MB/sec in the past 5 years, and now with NVMe technology and a 10 Gbps USB connector, we reach that 1 GB/sec marker. I don't know about you, but the speeds that the Crucial X8 offers are certainly fast enough for anything I demand for external/portable storage. Heck, this unit is even faster than an enthusiast-class SATA3 SSD, over USB. I love that.
Pricing and some QLC
A secondary key factor is that prices have come down increasingly with the development of the latest NAND technologies. Where Samsung will easily ask 500 bucks for their Thunderbolt version, here we have this 1 TB unit sitting at that $119.95 for 500GB and the 1TB version costing $164.95. Now I already mentioned, these are MSRP prices, street price will get lower, I have no doubt about it. Downsides then. Arguably you can argue if the use of QLC is warranted or a good choice. I have no issue with it as an external storage unit is used far less than say the P1 NVME M.2 SSD. And it's the same stuff really. The industry faces a couple of challenges, the end-users will not easily 'trust' QLC in terms of a number of writes and reliability. We have seen exactly the same with TLC, which now is an accepted NAND storage standard. It doesn't help that Crucial is not mentioning any TWB values on the website. Crucial, however, tops this unit off with a 3-year warranty, which is really nice and also something that QLC needs in terms of consumer trust. Write performance, depending on the workload you'll sit at 600 MB/sec copying multi-gig files sustained and linear (ISO/ UHD Movies, etc). From there on the trend is upwards closer to that 1 GB sec range.
By the way, temperatures are not an issue. The internal M.2. SSD is running below its actual capacity, and the housing is one huge heatsink. We have not seen load temperatures much higher than 45 Degrees C. And even if it would overheat, it has throttling protection. Crucial did this clever, basically, this is an M2 unit running over an ASMedia USB chip with proper cooling in a rather sexy package. The performance metrics are really good. Remember, this is a portable unit, we've not been testing a 'classic SSD or M2 unit' if you need to transfer HUGE files on a constant basis, hey man look for the money this looks to be great.
Concluding
Albeit pricing could be a notch better, we have to admit that we very much like the X8. it is one of the best performing 'USB sticks' your money can get you. Mandatory is obviously a 10 Gbps USB connector aka USB 3.1 / 3.2 Gen2. With a Gen1 connector, you'll halve the bandwidth, and get restricted at 625 MB/sec minus stuff like error-correction and latency from that USB interface. But even then, that's super fast for anything on USB. Most if not all motherboards from the year 2019 have a 10 Gbps USB jack though. NAND type, personally I am not worried about the usage of QLC as drive wearing technologies have become so much better. Also, the big volume size helps that endurance, of course, it, in the end, will last as long or longer as the P1 NVMe SSD we tested. Crucial is going large in volume with these units and will be offering a 500Gb and 1TB unit. Stability and compatibility wise we had no problems whatsoever with it and it is just the coolest looking easy to carry around portable storage unit. It's not super light though as Crucial made the casing a heatsink really. Overall we feel the X8 as an external SSD is record-breaking stuff, it deserves a top pick award even if only for innovation and implementation. With these speeds, you'll love it.
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