Performance
The performance has been tested on the AMD Ryzen platform, which contains the Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, ASUS Crosshair VIII Impact motherboard, Ballistix Elite 16GB DDR4-4000 memory kit, and Crucial P1 1TB SSD with installed Win10 Pro x64.
It’s required to use the latest motherboard with USB 3.2 controller to reach the maximum bandwidth on the X8 drive.
Let’s begin as usual with the ATTO Disk Benchmark.
The only benchmark in which we could see above 1GB/s read bandwidth was the ATTO in the older 3.46 version. The 4th version is already showing results slightly below 1GB/s mark. It’s because of various tests and used file sizes. We simply can’t compare results in various tests, but what is clear is that the drive is capable of reaching declared maximum speed.
The same in CrystalDiskMark, we can see that the drive is not far from the 1GB/s mark. In this case, regardless of the test scheme, we can count on 980-1000MB/s.
What is worth to mention is that the random performance of the drive, connected to USB 3.2 port is not much worse than that of internal SSD. It’s actually amazing that we can enjoy a similar experience on an internal and external drive.
If we don’t have a USB 3.2 controller in our PC or laptop, then we can always use any previous version of the USB interface. The drive will work with anything back to USB 2.0 but of course, the performance will be lower. Below you can see how the X8 drive performs on the USB3.0/3.1 controller. Random bandwidth is still great while sequential bandwidth is clearly limited by the USB controller. It doesn’t change the fact that the performance will not be much worse than that of the internal SATA USB.
It’s time to check the drive in a longer, mixed load scenario so about what we see daily on our computers.
Below we can see results based on PCMark 8. Our score is better than that of internal SATA SSD and not much worse of what we can see on popular M.2 PCIe SSD. 370MB/s in random operations is an amazing result for the X8 drive.
We also had a chance to check how the X8 performs in storage tests of PCMark10. These tests were recently released, and as you can see, the benchmark couldn’t recognize our test platform correctly, but all tests passed without problems. Results are pretty good, but since it’s a new benchmark, then are still hard to compare.
At the end, one more popular benchmark – Anvil’s Storage Utilities. Our result is slightly worse than what we could see in CrystalDiskMark but we are used to seeing similar differences on other storage devices.
Our tests are confirming the excellent performance of the Crucial X8. The drive should satisfy even the most demanding users as it’s clearly one of the best options on the USB external storage devices.
