4TB USB C SSD! Crucial X8 4TB Review

This tiny thing is the Crucial X8, a 4TB USB C SSD that’s slim enough to fit comfortably in your pocket, yet carry more storage than most gaming PCs have in total. Not bad, right? Let’s take a look at it and see how it performs – and compares to just putting a 4TB NVMe SSD in a USB C enclosure instead!

The specs on the box are that this should hit 1050MB/s on reads, and a touch less on writes. It’ll do up to 10Gbps over its USB C port, comes with a pretty tiny USB C to C cable and an A to C adapter and is shaped like a smoothed pebble with soft touch rubber on the end caps. Compared to Sabrent’s Rocket Pro this is a slim, sleek design that makes it much easier to carry with you when on the go.

Performance wise, Crystal Disk Mark reckons you’ll get almost exactly 1GB/s writes and 980MB/s reads at peak, AS SSD – which is always a lower figure – reckons more like 880MB/s reads and 725MB/s writes, and ATTO peaks at 960MB/s writes and 936MB/s on reads. That’s not bad, sure it isn’t quite the 1050MB/s quoted figure but I’d call it close enough. Compared to this Rocket Q 4TB in an M.2 USB C enclosure, the X8 is just as fast. AS SSD has a strong lead on writes with the M.2 drive, but ATTO reverses that with a much stronger lead especially in reads on the X8.

Even looking at a graph of the ATTO results, you can see the two are pretty well matched in writes, with the Rocket Q 4TB running around 15MB/s faster on the larger block sizes, although notably down by 15MB/s on the 4KB block size. Where it differs is in the reads, where the X8 is over 30MB/s slower at 4KB, but is subsequently over 150MB/s faster at the higher block sizes.

In my stress test where I duplicate those files to stress the controller on both reading and writing simultaneously, the X8 sat at just below 400MB/s for the majority of the transfer. That isn’t bad, although the Rocket Q 4TB was a little more stable at 430MB/s instead. Still that isn’t bad! Neither throttled during the transfer either – although with 4TB of capacity even at the full 1GB/s write it’d take over an hour to write the entire capacity so I’d doubt you’ll have any issues.

The biggest difference between these two solutions though is the price. Remarkably, the X8 is a surprisingly good value. That’s not to say it’s cheap, far from it, but compared to a £540 SSD and another £30 for the enclosure, the £410 the X8 4TB is selling for currently seems like a steal. In fact, as far as I’m aware it’s the cheapest 4TB external SSD you can buy right now! But who actually needs this? Who’s buying a 4TB USB C SSD? Well one use case I can think of is for recording videos direct from your camera – on cameras like the Black Magic models, recording to a USB C SSD is pretty common practice and having one that’s this big is definitely a benefit. Considering the largest portable SSD Samsung offers is just 2TB, having double the capacity – and therefore recording time – would be a sizable benefit, all for less money than two of Samsung’s 2TB drives. I’m sure there are plenty of other use cases, so please do leave your thoughts in the comments down below!

For me, this is a pretty great option. It’s slim and sleek, easy to bring with you in your pocket or in a bag, it’s plenty fast enough, big enough to fit most anything, and priced surprisingly low considering its capacity. If you don’t need quite so much space though, their 1TB and 2TB models are incredibly competitively priced too and I’d think are more in demand for everyday folk, rather than professionals who are business expensing these anyway. Still, good job Crucial.