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Crucial's excellent X9 portable SSD is going cheap in Amazon's Spring Sale

£65 for 1TB or £106 for 2TB on a fast 1050MB/s SSD.

crucial x9 portable ssd
Image credit: Crucial/Digital Foundry

Crucial is my go-to recommendation for portable SSDs, with their older and DF-recommended X6 and X8 models now being superceded by faster X9 and X10 alternatives. It's one of these newer drives that's on sale today as part of Amazon's Spring Sale, where you can pick up the 1TB Crucial X9 portable SSD for £65 (£17 off) or the better value 2TB size for £106 (£19 off).

Both drives are fast, with sequential speeds up to 1050MB/s, and come in a truly compact form factor, just 6.5x5x1cm! The drives are also robust, as you'd hope from models with no moving parts whatsoever, and are rated to survive drops from up 2.2 metres.

I've been very impressed with the X9 in my testing, and it's my current go-to for transferring game files between PCs or game consoles, moving downloaded video files to our TV downstairs and doing impromptu backups from phones, tablets, consoles and computers alike.

There's also a faster X10 Pro model that's also discounted for spring. This one is twice as fast, maxing out at 2100MB/s reads and 2000MB/s writes, but it does cost more. The 1TB size is £95 after a £30 reduction, while the better value 2TB model is £155 after a savings of £28. There's even a 4TB size which again is cheaper per gigabyte, clocking in at £268 after a modest price cut of £17.

I'd say the X10 Pro is worth the extra cost if you're planning to actually run games or other applications from the drive itself, where you really want to maximise speed and responsiveness, or if you're using it to store 4K video footage that you're editing into a video. However, if you're just using it to copy files from one place to another, then the extra speed isn't as impactful unless your files are truly massive, and the X9 is probably the better value option.

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