Crucial X6 4TB External SSD Performance

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warc1

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Aug 26, 2019
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I'm pretty sure I know the answer to the following issue, but I thought I'd ask in case I'm wrong. I just bought the subject drive which has a specified max read spec of up to 800MB/s. I can't find a write speed spec for this drive, which I know would be lower. Still, I tested this out on my desktop PC by connecting it to a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port that has a max bandwidth of 10Gb/s or 1250MB/s which exceeds the read spec for the X6 drive.

Regardless, I cannot exceed a transfer speed of 36MB/s when transferring data from my M2 NVMe PCIE 4 internal SSD. That speed only occurs with large files, over 2GB, with the average transfer rate dropping as low a 2MB/s for multiple small files. Transferring the same large files from one M2 NVMe PCIE 4 internal drive to a second such drive in my desktop results in transfer speeds exceeding 1200MB/s. That means the external SSD has a transfer rate that is over 30 times reduced compared to the internal drives.

I am aware that the performance specs for USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports are significantly overstated compared to real world performance and the same applies to SSD read and write speeds. Regardless, are the specs as much as 30 times overrated? I suspect the answer is "yes", but I thought I would check in case there is something defective with this new external drive.
 
Somethings off there... USB speeds are a bit overstated but not to such an extreme extent and one would expect higher speeds copying large multi-gigabyte files** What sort of cables are you using? It sounds like maybe it's stuck in USB 2.0 mode somehow.

** for reference, I just ran a benchmark on one of my external SSDs (NVMe drive in 10Gbit USB enclosure connected to 10Gbit port with cable rated for at least 10Gbit) and got a little above 1GB/s both read and write sequentially and worst-case around ~30MB/s random read, ~60MB/s random write.

I'm not familiar with your specific SSD but I'd expect much higher performance if it's rated for 800MB/s. Those numbers you're getting are like from a mediocre flash drive, not an SSD 🤔
 
36MB/s is slightly above what I would expect from USB 2. Especially if it is "flat lining" at that speed. It means the drive is easily able to keep up, but the port would be artificially limiting the bandwidth.
 
Are you using a USB-C cable that happens to be only 480Mbps? I see some cables that are charge cables with USB2 speeds only.
 
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