Who says your on-the-go external drive can’t be zippy? Amazon is selling the 500GB Crucial X8 portable external SSD for $80. That’s the all-time low price for this drive, well below the usual $120—and we already considered it a sterling value even at full cost.
We reviewed the Crucial X8 in April, giving it four out of five stars. “It’s a great performer the vast majority of the time…I wouldn’t hesitate to use the drive myself,” our reviewer said.
The one caveat with the Crucial X8 is that in massive file writes the drive can run out of cache. When that happens, write speeds can drop to a crawl. We reviewed the 1TB drive, but we figure the 500GB version will run out of cache somewhere around the 90GB mark. Most people don’t move 90GB of data in one go very often, though, and anything below that should perform quite well.
The drive’s lightning speeds aren’t only due to the TLC NAND this SSD uses. It also features a blazing fast USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, and Crucial says it supports read speeds up to 1,050 megabytes per second read speeds. In our tests, it hit just below that speed, and sequential write speeds were around 1,010 MB/s.
Even at full price, this drive delivers excellent bang for your buck. After a huge $40 discount, that value is even higher.
[Today’s deal: 500GB Crucial X8 portable external SSD for $80.]