The test system used in this review is equipped with an Intel Core i7-6700K CPU, GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-UD3 motherboard, 32GB (16GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 memory, Samsung 960 PRO 512GB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 Enterprise.
To test the performance of Crucial's X8 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark 8. For comparison, I've also included test results from the ADATA's XPG SX6000 Pro, Western Digital WD Black SN750, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, Crucial P1, ADATA XPG SX8200, Western Digital WD Black NVMe, Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 970 PRO, Plextor M9Pe, Plextor M8Se, Patriot Hellfire, ADATA XPG SX8000, Samsung 960 PRO, Toshiba OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, ADATA Ultimate SU750, SK hynix Gold S31, Samsung 860 QVO, Samsung 860 PRO, Crucial MX500, Plextor M8V, Samsung T5 and Crucial BX300.
As I mentioned earlier, the X8 is based on Silicon Motion's SM2263EN controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark tool measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its random read and write speeds using blocks 512K and 4K in size.
 Crucial X8 1TB |
 Crucial P1 1TB |
According to Crucial, the 1TB version of the X8 is capable of reading at speeds up to 1,050 MB/s. While the drive performed fairly well, it came up a bit short of this number in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read speed test.
 Crucial X8 1TB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
 Crucial P1 1TB - All 0x00, 0Fill |
The X8 performed equally well when using highly compressible 0x00 (0 Fill) data. This time around, the drive was able to read at 915.8 MB/s and write at 916.5 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the Crucial X8's read, write and burst speeds as well as its seek times and CPU usage.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the X8 had average read and write speeds of 334.7 MB/s and 147.7 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 478.9 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that it uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 400 MB/s and then drops to about 90 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the Crucial X8's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 0.5KB to 8192KB and the total length set to 256MB.
 Crucial X8 1TB |
 Crucial P1 1TB |
When tested with ATTO, the Crucial X8's read speeds topped out at about 1,034 MB/s and its write speeds at 982 MB/s.
