The Crucial X8: the ideal portable SSD for gaming storage

Has your game collection filled the drive on your PC, Mac or console? Instead of deleting perfectly good games to clear space, move the entire library to a portable solid state drive, or SSD. Do you play games on several systems? Consolidate all of those files on a portable SSD. Do you play games on several systems in your home, at your friend’s place, or in gaming cafés? You guessed it: The portable SSD is for you. And with the added capacity, speed, and durability of SSDs, your games will run smoother and load faster than when you relied on internal storage. As an added bonus, portable SSDs can double as the home for your media library, enabling easy access to movies, TV shows, apps, documents, or anything else, on any computer, wherever you go.

But what external SSD is best for you? It’s no small thing to trust your gaming library to a device that can fit into your pocket. Astute gamers should consider the two most important factors when picking their portable SSD: speed and capacity. All arrows point to the Crucial X8. Here’s why.

Fun fact: even the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro use hard drives rather than SSDs, which are faster and have already mostly overtaken the PC market. That means that most external SSDs will provide noticeably shorter load times, especially for some of the bigger, slower-loading games out there. Want proof? The gamer tech blog GamersNexus.net ran benchmark tests and found that an Xbox One with an external SSD provided better performance for all five games it tested. Destiny 2, which had the longest load time of the bunch, loaded in 56 seconds on the stock Xbox One X HDD versus 37.1 seconds on the SSD. That’s one third less time.

With read speeds up to 1,050MB/s, the Crucial X8 portable SSD loads files up to 1.8 times faster than most portable SSDs, 7.5 times faster than portable hard drives, and 100 times faster than USB flash drives¹. Simply put, the X8 will far outperform the stock Xbox One or PS4 drive and most other portable storage options. 

Popular games are requiring more and more storage. Red Dead Redemption 2, for example, requires 150GB of storage space to install on the PS4 and 107GB on the Xbox One. After its 2018 release, gamers flooded the internet with memes praising RDR2. But some of the most famous memes instead focused on the game’s agonizingly long installation time.

RDR2, obviously, is a sequel. The original Red Dead Redemption released in 2010 required about 8GB on PlayStation 3 and less than 7GB on the XBOX 360. So, yeah. Modern games require far, far more storage to support those big and dynamic worlds than those from previous generations. While the new Red Dead is an infamous example of storage drain, more and more of today’s titles are large enough to force players to either delete games to make space or to invest in external storage.

The Crucial X8 is available in 500GB and 1TB, meaning it will hold many players’ entire game library in one slim, sleek, black, and stylish gadget that will look great next to any PC or console. Those with expansive game collections can split their libraries between the external and internal storage devices. Hard-core game hoarders can always go with two X8s. 

Gamers who fill up storage drives or play in several places will love the speed, capacity, and portability of external SSDs. Players looking to get the most out of their storage will entrust the Crucial X8 portable SSD for safely storing their precious game libraries.

^{1.       MB/s speed measured as maximum sequential performance of device as measured by Crucial on a high performance desktop computer with Crystal Disk Mark (version 6.0.2 for x64). Your performance may vary. Comparative speed claims measured as maximum sequential performance of similarly situated portable SSDs, mainstream portable HDDs and mainstream USB flash drives from vertically-integrated manufacturers selling under their own brands as of June 2019.}