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This speedy, portable 1TB Crucial SSD is now $25 off

This external SSD is "7.5x faster than portable hard drives", and is great value for this price

Crucial X8 external SSD

The best SSDs for gaming are undoubtedly internal NVMe drives, but we shouldn't forget external SSDs, either. External drives have plenty of uses, some of which you might not have considered. And they don't have to be the slow hard drives of old, these days, either – this speedy Crucial 1TB X8 portable SSD proves this, and it's now on offer for $164.95, $25 (13%) off on Amazon US, and £152.39, £5.19 (3%) off on Amazon UK.

An external SSD like this one has many uses. While it can obviously be used to take important documents and files to different locations, it can also be used to transfer files to new gaming PC builds, back up important documents, and even be used as a home to install a portable operating system onto. While having enough capacity to install any programs you want and enough speed to have a pretty responsive operating system for one that's installed onto an external drive.

This external SSD works with most USB-C and USB-A devices over USB 3.1 or 3.2 interfaces. Gen 2 allows for 20Gb/s transfer speeds and Gen 1 allows for 10Gb/s, meaning the USB connection shouldn't bottleneck the SSD at all over either interface.

The SSD itself is rated up to 1,050MB/s, which Crucial (a Micron brand) says should mean “you can load files up to 1.8x faster than most portable SSDs, 7.5x faster than portable hard drives, and 100x faster than USB flash drives”. Those of you that already use a portable hard drive probably know that large file transfers can be painfully slow – this X8 portable SSD is almost eight times quicker than what you might be used to.

Buy now

It looks pretty nice, too, and features an “anodised aluminium unibody core”, making it drop-proof up to 7.5 feet. Crucial also says it’s “extreme temperature, shock, and vibration-proof” – and if this doesn’t convince you, it also comes with a three-year limited warranty. If you’re in the market for an external drive, at this $25 discount the X8 1TB is a great choice.