I've been testing some of the best external SSDs for the last few months and reckon this Crucial X9 is worth a look if you're in the market for a high-capacity budget drive. The 2 TB version is currently on sale for $110 at Amazon. That puts it at less than $0.06 per GB of storage, which is about as good as you can get for a decent external drive.
And yes, I know, external SSDs aren't exactly the most exciting things in the world, but when you need one, you need one. An external drive is one of those things that you might not have to use right away but is good to have just in case—for system backups or game library transfers, for instance.
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The $110 price tag for this drive is $39 off its non-discounted price, but more importantly it's not much more than many other decent drives with half the capacity regularly go for. Admittedly, that's because the Crucial X9 is a USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 drive that caps out at 1,050 MB/s whereas these other 1 TB drives cap out closer to 2,000 MB/s. But I'd argue this speed difference matters zilch for most people.
That's because many relatively modern systems have just one port capable of supporting faster than 3.2 Gen 2x1 speeds, and older ones might not have any. USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 drives such as the X9 here are still much more widely supported, even as USB4 drives are hitting the market.
If you have the portage for an even quicker drive then it might be worth considering a 1 TB Adata SD810 for $76 at Amazon, or something similar instead. But for most people, at this price the X9 offers plenty of speed and capacity for an eminently reasonable amount of money.
In my testing, I found the X9 to deliver sustained write speeds of over 950 MB/s for over six minutes, which means well over 300 GB of data being transferred before its pseudo-SLC cache runs out and speeds drop. That should fit most use cases, I reckon.
Gaming performance is perfectly fine, too. If you're planning on using it as a library to store your games on, its random 4k performance is decent, and I found it to boot games up and play them with no stuttering at all.
The icing on the cake is that it looks rather unassuming, too, meaning you can take it out and about with you without making any onlookers aghast. It even has a little slot to attach a lanyard, if that's your jam.
If you see yourself potentially needing lots of external storage in the future, for backups, game libraries, creative content transfers, media libraries, or anything else, the Crucial X9 is well worth a look at its current price. It's not the fastest or the flashiest, but it's reliable and cheap for what you're getting.
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