CrucialX9 1TB Portable External SSD - Up to 1050MB/s, External Solid State Drive, Works with PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Mac, USB-C 3.2 - CT1000X9SSD902

What do I say? Very tiny and portable. Lightning fast transfer. The only downside is that the cable is very short. Also, the price is VERY reasonable.

I got this because i was becoming worried about an older hard drive I have that was starting to take a long time to appear on my desktop and was making occasional clicking sounds which i know is a bad sign, so rather than lose my data i got one of these little ssd drives and Im very happy with it, i got another one to connect to my TV which I have put music on, thousands of MP3 files, and it has been great. Copying to the drive is very fast and reading from it is almost instantaneous, excellent ! i want the 8tb one now but will have to save up a bit for that ! Very simple to get started with, you just plug it in to whatever device you are using and its there immediately.

This handy device gives you instant access to a massive amount of extra memory, to either use to store - as a back-up - or transfer your data to another device. A few years ago I bought a similar (functional) device, but that was the size of a shoe box, you had to power it from 240VAC, and it wasn’t compatible with all my devices. This little gadget is cheap, fits into the palm of my hand, data transfer is instantaneous and it takes its power directly from the USB. What’s not to like? Oh and it’s a fraction of the price!

For most people, the lure of an external SSD over a traditional mechanical hard drive, is speed. Crucial X8 boasts up to 1050Mb/sec transfer rate when copying files using it. Crucial's claim may well be true, given the drive is essentially a USB type C device with a backwards compatible type A converter for use with all legacy USB ports. BTW, type A ports are what the vast majority of any USB equipped PC's come with.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 can not believe how small this SSD is but it works brilliant. I have brought the 2TB version and it's very simple and easy to use, just plug in and play. I then decided to move all my games from steam on to this, the transfer speed was really quick, even for big file games like Microsoft Flight Simulator & City Skylines 2. I have not heard this make any noise so it's nice and quiet, I will definitely be buying another one for my Xbox.Overall: I can not fault this item one bit, it actually worked better than I thought it would.

I really like my Crucial X9 1TB Portable External SSD it has been an absolute work horse since I purchased it & it has coped admirably with all I've chucked at it. This real small, well made, quiet & compact drive, with an easy USB-C connection is easy to set up and use in no time. I won't go into detail on speeds & transfer of data etc as there's plenty of others on this site who can satisfy your needs for that. I just want to say I'm really happy with this drive & highly recommend it.👍