Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsGREAT drive, fast and small!
Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2023
I got my previous portable storage solution, the platter-based HDD WD My Passport Ultra in 2TB capacity, back in mid-2015. It's held up for almost eight years and I've been very proud of it. Recently it started to click, most likely meaning that it is on its way out. I take that to mean that the read-write head is striking the inside of the case on occasion. It actually happens maybe only once every two or three minutes when it's idle. So, maybe it's not that bad. And I could retire it to use as an only-occasionally backup drive - when I was copying and moving content from it to the new drive so it could be more easily accessible, the clicking did not occur nearly as often, so maybe I was worried for not much.
Which is, fortunately, not an issue at all with the new SSD that I got just recently: Crucial X6! Same capacity, taking up the same position on my desk, but incredibly small - and no moving parts to wear out! YAY!
Though of course I don't know for sure, I imagine that the inside is a small form-factor M.2 drive flanked with heat spreaders - the only other option is that the drive takes up the entire space inside the case.
Either way, the drive is awesome and performs quite quickly for any number of applications. Much more quickly than the old magnetic drive, that's for sure. A weird thing is that it does not like CrystalDiskMark - creating its test file and then the speed test on it, well, takes a lot longer than I thought it would, whether I keep it on the default of 1 GB or go down to 128 MB. This makes this program unreliable for speed tests in my configuration - if I did not stop the test and let it show the speed that it determined, it would likely be much slower than the actual drive’s speed.
Speaking of my configuration: my computer does not have a USBC port on it natively, and this drive only has a USBC port on it, most likely to save on space and keep the drive as miniscule as it possibly can be. Thus, I had to get a USBC to USBA adapter cable, which I had gotten before for use with another drive. As far as I can tell, without being able to use a benchmark program as previously stated, the functionality and speed is fine with this SUNGUY brand cable. And the cable is fairly snazzy as well as you can see, its nylon-esque cover being braided!
Back at its inception two years ago, this drive was incredibly expensive at $285, and it was only available in 1 and 2 TB variants - now there's a 4 terabyte variant which I may get sometime. I was able to get this 2 TB variant for $110 and I am very happy about that. In retrospect, it might have been a bit better to be a bit more circumspect about my purchase and spend the extra $20 on the X8, which comes with its own USBA adapter and is apparently faster? (limited by the USBA connection, of course)
But that's all right - this will do for me for now, and I'm sure that somewhere down the line I will get the X8 as well, and repurpose this drive for maybe an extra storage device for my Xbox One - or the other way around. Goodness knows it's slow enough with its magnetic drive built in.
So yeah. get this drive if you want a little extra capacity and you're able to find a good spot for it to sit on your desk. Since it is so lightweight and small and thus likely to get lost if you don't secure it, I do highly recommend getting cable clips like those little adhesive/silicone ones that can grab onto cables and hold things securely in place - the ones I got have the brand names of OHill, ChefBee and ONME (yeah, I have lots of cables that need securing! ) and are sold here on Amazon for around $10, and come in both white and black (ONME had some Browns in their collection as you can see, but they stopped selling them over the past two years). Do some shopping as your needs entail 🙂
Take care, awesome fellow computer people, and happy storing!