Our favourite portable SSD is down to £77 at Amazon
A historic low price for a USB-connected 1050MB/s SSD.
The Crucial X8 is our favourite portable SSD, thanks to its compact protective frame, convenient USB-A or USB-C connection and excellent performance. It's capable of transfer speeds up to 1050MB/s, minimising the time it takes to copy files to and from the drive, and offers low enough access times that you can easily run games from it too. It normally costs around £85, but today it's dropped to a historic low price of £77 - a great value for a portable NVMe SSD offering this level of performance.
The Crucial X8 has been covered by the good ship RPS in some detail, with the drive appearing as the 'best external SSD' in our best SSD for gaming round-up and also being the subject of its own full-length Crucial X8 review. As our hardware department point out, the X8 supports the modern USB 3.2 Gen 2 standard, unlocking those higher peak transfer speeds that beat even the new and more expensive Samsung T7 Shield. There's even some trivia:
RPS chief Katharine used to use this very model for shifting game installations around various laptops and PC setups for testing, prior to escaping the hardware cupboard and pushing me into it before the door locked shut.
That took a dark turn. Anyway, this is a great portable SSD for the money, and my own unit has become indispensable for viewing high quality video downloads from my computer on the TV downstairs. Just copy over the file, plug it into the TV and you're away - no faffing around with streaming, file servers or anything like that. Similarly, it's very handy if you need to rapidly populate a computer with your favourite games - for example, if a mate comes over to have a little LAN party. Anyway, I'm sure you'll come up with your own uses for this excellent drive, so I'll leave it to you.
Thanks for joining me once again, and stay tuned for one more deals post before I retire to the deals cave for this week and begin my weekend slumber.