Crucial X8 slower than mechanical drive!

sgoaty

sgoaty

sgoaty

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I treated myself to a 4TB crucial X8 portable SSD for my media/games OTG drive.

While transferring around 1TB of media files I noticed the transfer rate decline to around 50-60mb after a couple of minutes.

I've tried this on a different PC which was transferring files from an internal nvme drive and experienced the same result.

I'm using a high speed rated cable and have tried the boards usb 3 and 3.2 ports.

Can anyone offer up any suggestions?
Thanks
Scott
 
Leave the machine and drive powered on, but pause all transfers to the drive for about 5 minutes. After 5 minutes resume the transfers and I think you will probably see normal speeds resume for a brief period, as the drive's cache fills up again.

I think the problem is that you're filling the drive's cache, hence it slowing down. Pausing the transfers allows the drive to empty the cache, giving you normal SSD speeds again.

I think you'll just have to put up with the slow speed and accept that this is a one-off thing until everything has been transferred.
 
You may be running into the limitations of QLC with a transfer of that size. 50-60MB/s is the typical write speed once the pseudo-SLC cache is exhausted on a QLC drive.

You can see that here in the sequential write section:

www.tomshardware.com

Crucial X8 Portable SSD Review: a Speedy Value (Updated)

QLC helps make this a fast, affordable external.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com

The 1TB drops to those speeds after 200GB when empty. So the 4TB should manage 800GB ish if empty, a lot less is it's not empty.
 
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Thanks very much for the information.


It seems like something that Crucial/windows should manage better. I'd rather the transfer paused for a minute or so on it's own then continued at a higher speed than it just going at a snails pace for the majority of the transfer.

I came across this while looking at reviews for the drive. Any truth to it?

Heads up for Windows users - the product comes preformatted as ExFAT, which is to ensure compatibility with non-Windows products (PlayStation etc) but it's dreadfully slow especially when copying/reading/even deleting small files. If you reformat was NTFS the problem will be solved.

Thanks
Scott
 
ExFAT is not great at handling small files - they can take up way more space on a drive due to the block size as well as slow performance.
 
You will still get the throttled speeds even on NTFS as the cache fills up. I have a Samsung 8TB QVO SSD in a USB 3.1 enclosure for example. Transfers start at over 350MB/s but after several mins it drops to a bit under 150MB/s. That drive has a 6GB SLC cache with a 72GB dynamic cache using TurboWrite.

So yeah whatever SATA class SSD you have, you will be filling the cache and getting slower write speeds if doing a big transfer.job.
 
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I got this drive just 1 week ago and I ran into the same problem about the writing speed. But yesterday I discovered that if you download the Crucial Storage Executive Tool and then turn on the "Momentum Cache" feature on your SSD, the speed will at least double up!

The only important thing about enabling this feature is that you always have to safely remove the SSD through the windows tool before unplugging it!
 
Yes I've enabled this on my Sata 2 restricted old ASRock P45TS system on the win11 drive It runs pretty well with ddr3 anyway but mc boosts the read speed from 284mbs to 1484 & write from 272 to 1200 ish. At 39 Euros for a 500gb ssd I'm enabling it even if it just helps boot & opening apps & unlike the samsung version no effect on your warranty. If you lose data on that disk in a power cut no problem as long as you clone backups regularly & all important personal docs pwords etc on another drive.... It seems like a win/win to me!
 
I just discovered a very surprising solution....

I posted a similar question on a Dutch forum about the write speed of this Crucial SSD. Someone asked me if I had tried another cable. As I only used the original cable that was in the box with the SSD, I gave it a try with another cable and guess what...... :-) I never thought of trying this, because who would expect that a brand new cable that comes with a priduct would be the bottleneck?
 
Great find!
Yes sometimes it's the simplest parts that let you down. I had a hifi Toslink splitter I thought was faulty so stripped it down contact cleaner & checked internals etc all ok. After trying another power supply discvrd it was just the dc jack cable connection that had fractured in it's tiny plug.
 
It's not actually doubling the speed, it's using system RAM to them background write the dtavto ty drive which seems faster
DutchBird1984 said:
I got this drive just 1 week ago and I ran into the same problem about the writing speed. But yesterday I discovered that if you download the Crucial Storage Executive Tool and then turn on the "Momentum Cache" feature on your SSD, the speed will at least double up!

The only important thing about enabling this feature is that you always have to safely remove the SSD through the windows tool before unplugging it!
Click to expand...
This is just using system ram to cache, then later write to the ssd in the bg. It's more an illusion of immediate speed than anything actually useful.

Samsung does the same in Magician and call it Rapid Mode.
 
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