Review on 💨 Crucial X8 500GB Portable SSD: High-Speed 1050MB/s, USB-C & USB-A Connectivity by Robert Berio

I originally wrote this five star review but after a few weeks of use I had to downgrade to three stars. I'm having trouble finding an external SSD that works correctly with macOS Catalina. Some others have horrible reviews, poor performance, and generally don't work properly. What matters first is what works. First, read speeds are as advertised (and twice as fast as SanDisk or Ravpower portable SSDs). I needed an external APFS solid state drive for Final Cut and this drive is perfect for the job. Formatting is very easy as it doesn't come with bloated fixed partitions like Ravpower so the process was painless. The downsides are that write speeds suffer greatly due to the lack of DRAM, which would help maintain drive speeds for large copy jobs. . Because of this, when copying large files, write speeds often drop to hard-to-achieve speeds. Copying 180GB would take about an hour at the speeds I'm seeing on my drive. To be honest, almost all drives available are sub-par and there is a huge lack of suitable devices in this market. It does the job if you don't need to rely on copying lots of files to disk quickly. If you use it to read files, that's good enough.