Crucial X9 1TB Portable External SSD, Really Small But Big On Performance..
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.👍

Nowhere Near
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.

Does the job – and does it well.
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.

Excellent form factor, read/write speed is good, DiskMark seq read = 740 MB/S, seq write=790 MB/S

Matizar que lo quiero especialmente para grabar vídeo 6K y 4K con mi cámara Lumix S5II X. Por lo tanto las pruebas están hechas con el formateo de la cámara, que es exfat. NTFS debería dar aún mejor resultado pero no lo he probado (ni lo necesito). Tampoco tengo puertos thunderbolt así que no puedo opinar sobre eso. Es un puerto 3.2 tipo C de hasta 10Gbps*Decir que lo he conectado también a mi Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (antes del formateo con la cámara) y lo ha leído a la primera como una unidad más sin hacer nada. Así que fabuloso si quieres meter alguna peli para un viaje largo.En Exfat arroja 670/650 MBps sostenidos. Probado transfiriendo un archivo pesado de 50Gb. Que ha durado literalmente un par de minutos.La cámara ha leído bien el disco que es lo que me importaba, y marca grabación en 4K 4:2:2 a 150Mbps de 13h. 6k 4:0:0 10h. Así que sobrado en ese sentido.Estuve pensando en el Sandisk Extreme o en el Samsung T7 shield. Más caros por la resistencia al agua y polvo que no necesito de momento. Y en velocidad me ofrecían lo mismo. Así que me he ahorrado un dinero.El otro modelo con el que compite es el pequeñísimo Kingston XS1000. El problema es que este trae USB A y mi cámara usa tipo C, por lo que tenía que comprar un cargador aparte que encarecen el producto. La versión XS2000 si incluye cable tipo C a C que es lo que busco pero sube de precio y no necesito esa velocidad.El cable algo cort. He podido colocarlo en la zapata de la cámara sobre un soporte universal de Neweer, colocándolo del lado donde está la conexión llega algo justo pero sin forzar las conexiones y queda bien. Recomiendo siempre usar el cable del SSD si quieres tener las velocidades indicadas, o fijarse bien en la categoría (3.2; 3.2 x2; o thunderbolt) si necesitas más metros de cable.PROS:•Extremadamente pequeño. Mide apenas 6 X 4 cm.•Barato.•Suficientemente rápido.•Bonito.•No se calienta más allá que cualquier otro.•MemoriaCONTRAS:•Material de plástico.•Cable un pelín justo según el uso que le des.Y poco más, un pequeño gran compañero de batallas a partir de ahora. Por supuesto lo volvería a comprar.