Nab this Crucial X8 4TB portable SSD for just ?184 from Amazon
A Crucial discount.
After the madness that was Prime Day 2023, Amazon has decided to bundle a discount on the bigger 4TB Crucial X8, the brand's top of the line portable SSD that brings it down to a fantastic price - £184 for 4TB of storage works out to just 4.6p per GB, or £46 per TB.
Crucial's X-line of portable SSDs are a Digital Foundry favourite, especially this top of the line X8 model. It provides read speeds of up to 1050MB/s, making it massively faster than a USB flash drive or a mechanical hard drive - and double the speed of the fastest internal SATA SSDs. This means file transfers are particularly speedy, and you can even play games directly from this drive on PC and last-gen consoles. Of course, the X8 isn't just a game drive, and any other files you load onto it will be able to be quickly pulled up.
With this in mind, you can also use this for playing last-gen console games - whether on last-gen consoles themselves or for backwards-compatible titles on PS5, Series X and Series S. Unfortunately, external drives aren't supported for playing current-gen PS5 or Series X/S titles directly, although you can use the X8 as a convenient way to store unused games to save space on the internal drive, then restore them quickly when you want to play them again - a process that's much faster than re-downloading the games again.
This is also the largest model of X8 available, with four whole terabytes of space, giving you oodles of space for games, personal files, photos or videos. Usually people don't need drives this big, but it's especially handy for those of us with large local libraries of photos, videos, and music. For reference, 4TB is enough for 1.24m photos, or 1000 films that are 2 hours long, so if you wanted a drive to house your digitised film library, here you go!
The X8 is also a properly rugged portable drive, given it's drop proof to a height up to 2 metres, and Crucial also says the drive is also resistant to vibration, shock, and extreme temperature. As a solid-state drive, too, there aren't any moving parts, which lends itself to being more reliable, unlike a mechanical hard drive, which is vulnerable to magnets or simple knocks or drops given its fragile read-and-write head.
If you're after a solid top of the line portable SSD for less for storing a shedload of files on, this 4TB Crucial X8 is an immense option from Amazon for the price.