PC World - USA (2020-05)

MAY 2020 PCWorld 91

next-slowest drive took a little under 23

minutes. Yowser.

We haven’t seen an SSD of any type drop

to that low of a write rate in several years,

For 1GB files, the Crucial X8 Portable SSD is as fast
as the competition.

Sequential Write

(Q=32, T=1)

CrystalMark 6

MBps

779

1,010

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

1,033

925

Sequential Read

(Q=32, T=1) 410 1,0 43

1,0 4 4

1,034

Crucial X8 Portable PNY Pro Elite

Samsung T7 SanDisk Extreme Portable Pro SSD

The X8 Portable SSD’s 48GB copy test results
are highly competitive, nearly the equal of
those turned in by SanDisk’s top-dog Extreme
Portable Pro.
And then...there was the 450GB write
test. Most users will never write this large a
file, or this amount of data in a single sitting.
We do it to test the limits of the drive’s
caching techniques. Most external SSDs
maintain at anywhere from 400MBps to
600MBps. The Crucial X8 Portable SSD
wrote at almost 600MBps for the first 190GB
or so, then it sank to a rather sickly 80MBps
for the rest of the test. No, the enormously
long dark-green bar you see in the chart is
not a good thing. It’s over an hour, where the

When on cache, as it was the vast majority of the

time, the X8 is almost as fast as SanDisk’s Extreme

Portable Pro.

Tot al t ime

48GB copies

Seconds

642

586

SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

574

683

48GB folder

write 205

221

195

272

48GB folder

read 230

214

225

203

48GB folder

48GB read

104

72

136

103

82

72

86

65

Crucial X8 Portable PNY Pro Elite

Samsung T7 SanDisk Extreme Portable Pro SSD