If you’re looking for a huge amount of portable storage, which you can copy to and from at high speeds, Amazon has a 500GB Crucial X6 portable drive on sale for just $49.99 today. That’s less than I paid for two whiskey sours at a Manhattan bar a few weeks ago…and since the SSD got a PCWorld Editor’s Choice award, it’s probably a much better investment.
In our review, Jon L Jacobi praised the drive’s pocket-friendly design and solid performance, though the SATA drive does tend to struggle if you move enough files to fill up its temporary cache. With a transfer speed of 375 megabytes per second, you can copy a 50-gigabyte file to the drive in about eleven minutes. It’s currently the top-rated budget recommendation in our guide to the best external drives.
The Crucial X6 was $70 at the 500GB level when we reviewed it a few years ago. Today Amazon has it on sale for considerably less — and if you happen to have an Amazon Prime Visa card, you can take an extra ten percent off.
If you need even more storage, Amazon is selling the 1TB version of the drive for $74.89, a $25 discount off the sticker price. 2TB and 4TB versions are also discounted, though less dramatically.