Crucial X8 1TB External SSD Review

Out of the box, the drive is factory formatted as exFAT but to run our benchmarks we reformatted the drive as NTFS.

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using version 7.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

Crucial's official Sequential read figure for the drive is up to 1,050MB/s. With the ATTO benchmark, we couldn't quite get to the official read maximum, with the review sample topping out at 950MB/s, with writes reaching 945MB/s. All the other Sequential tests we tried, namely AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark, ended up shy of the official maximum, but the closest we saw was when the drive was tested with compressible data in Crystal Disk Mark, where the X8 produced a read figure of 1000MB/s.

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