A couple of weeks or so ago, I bit the bullet and purhased a Crucial X6 2TB Portable SSD from Crucial's website. They were running a little sale where I got like $60 off the MSRP of $249.95. I also talked myself into buying a Crucial BX500 2TB 2.5 inch [internal] SSD. It wasn't on sale but I figured that the discount on the X6 was enough to even out the extra purchase. I also thought that if I didn't like one or the other, I would return it.
I normally don't like to spend around or even spend $200 for an external hard drive but I needed to replace my Seagate Backup Plus 4TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0 that recently crashed after three years. It wasn't an SSD and the mechanical parts of the drive seemed to have failed to the point where I could not get any data off of it. It wouldn't even show and connect as a drive. Luckily, I'm a backup of a backup of a backup of a backup kind of guy and have many other smaller drives from 320GB to 1TB with my files spread across them all.
Anyway, I almost didn't get the SSDs because I could really save a lot of money if I just went with the standard mechanical hard drive. Amazon had a Seagate 2TB and 5TB for like $59.99 and $89.99, respectively. I just felt like I'd run into the same problem of the mechanical part crapping out on me. I mean the 4TB did last me three years but I've had hard drives last me much longer.
Ordering on the Crucial website was easy peasy. Shipping ended up being quicker than the website said by about a day or two. So instead of 5 days I got them in 3 days...I think.
Once I got them from the mailbox, I opened and inspected the packages. The X6 comes with a USB-C to USB-C cable that's about six inches long. The BX500 was just the drive which was to be expected. I already had a couple of USB 3.0 cables to connect to it. I connected each of the cables to their respective drive and connected to my computer: a Dell XPS13. The BX500 had to be formatted but the X6 worked as needed out of the box.
I immediately started backing up files to each drive with some software I like and use called SyncBackFree (I guess I need to write a review post on it some day). Back up to both drives went fairly smoothly. It wasn't extremely fast but I was backing up about 1TB of data and it was coming from an external USB 3.0 mechanical drive to the external SSDs. I backed up to each drive at separate times and each back up took about three hours. When I backed up about 200GB from my C: drive, the transfer was much faster.
One thing to note that I didn't pay much attention to is that the X6 came formatted as exFAT. I didn't find that out until about a week later when I tried to rip a DVD movie I own to the X6. When I was trying to do the whole process of ripping to converting to ISO then converting ISO to MP4, the process kept crapping out. That's when I realized the exFAT formatting because it wasn't allowing files over like 1TB to be created and saved. So I had to reformat the X6 to NTFS. This obviously erased all the files I had backed up so I had to do it all over again. Fun times!
That's about all I know so far. The drives perform as they should. I guess time will tell if I get at least three years out of them like I did the Seagate 4TB. My assumption is I should and would but who knows.
In the images below, image 1 is the X6 and the included USB-C to USB-C cable. Image 2 is the X6 next to an AirPords (1st gen) case and a SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD for size references. Image 3 is the X6 and the SanDisk drive again for more size reference.
That's my take on these two Crucial SSD drives. They are light, portable, fast and are working just fine right now. Hopefully, all will be well for many years to come. I do wish they were cheaper as I believe SSDs have been around for a while now and it'd be nice if they price drop to at least half of the cost I paid.
SIDE NOTE: I do own the SanDisk drive in the photos but have not written a review on it. It'll probably be the same as the X6 as they are basically the same but different companies and form factors.
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