The Crucial X6 is a 2TB external SSD that is designed to be a lower-cost and compact option. This is a USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gb/s) USB SSD. That is not considered anywhere near the fastest these days, but many systems have plenty of USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, and these drives can be produced at a lower cost, making this a very popular class of drives. Let us get into what Crucial is offering.
At around a $119-129 street price, the Crucial X6 2TB costs around $30 less than the company’s faster X9 Pro. It is also around $40 less than the Samsung T7 Shield 2TB. From a performance perspective, the X9 Pro is certainly faster, but these drives are fast enough for some who may opt to save a chunk of change. Especially given that many systems do not have faster USB ports available.
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Crucial X6 2TB SSD Hardware Overview
The drive itself is very small at 64 x 50 x 11 mm. This is considerably smaller than a drive like the Samsung T7 Shield and very similar to the X9 Pro.
Shock-resistant, vibration-proof, and built to withstand drops from up to 6.5 feet.
On the bottom, we get the label. Something small, but nice, is that this says X6 and 2TB in fairly large print. Some other SSDs make it hard to see the capacity except for very fine print.
Connectivity is USB 3.2 Gen2 in a Type-C port.
In the box, we also got a short Type-C to Type-C cable, which is always useful.
Before we switch to performance, let us quickly look at the specs from the Crucial website on this drive:
It is not common to see 4K random specs on these external USB drives. What is very uncommon is to not have a sequential write speed and only have the 800MB/s sequential read speed. That “N/A” in sequential write
Next, let us get to performance.
For an external SSD I would be interested in cell leakage and shelf-life data retention.