Lexar SL100 Portable SSD Review (1TB)

So we have been on a bit of a roll with Lexar products for the last week or so, and that is a good thing.  For those not familiar with Lexar, they had a very strong presence in the media storage world, originally a Micron company but sold to Longsys of China back in August of 2017.  This of course raised a bit of concern for many of the Lexar loyal, myself included as I have always been partial to Lexar products in my cameras. In fact, our reviews of the past week will have been the first since the companies transition and if these products are any indication of quality, the Lexar brand is alive and well!

On our review bench today is the Lexar Professional SL100 Pr0 1TB Portable SSD. It is a bus-powered Type-C storage device and is capable of transfer speeds up to 950MB/s read and 900MB/s write.  It is available in 250GB, 500GB amd 1TB capacities and comes with a 3-year limited warranty.

The SL100 is constructed of a black and silver brushed aluminum finish, compatible with Mac or Windows USB 3.1 Type-A or Type-C connections and includes Data Vault Lite which can be downloaded directly from Lexar; this security software enabling the 256-bit AES encryption.  Its main component is the JMS583 USB to PCIe/NVMe Bridge chip that we have reviewed prior to public release.  I have to admit I was wrong about this chip, not initially believing in its popularity as performance was far below those beutiful speeds of 2.8GB/s, however, we have looked at several devices now all with the JMS583 and all have exactly the same performance.  This chip has met with a great deal of success.

The SL100 is very compact, measuring 2.165″ x 2.89″ x .425″, weighs 70.5g, and can withstand temperatures from -40 to 85 degrees Celsius.  It comes with both a Type-C to Type-C connector, along with the USB 3.1 Type-A to Type-C connector, and performance for our tests is measured with the Type-C to Type-C connector.

Checking Amazon, we can see that pricing is listed at $87.99 for the 250GB, $134.99 for the 500GB and $239.99 for the 1TB capacity SL100 Pro. This has a 4.2/5 rating but a heads up, as the ratings apply to the former USB 3.1 version as well.  Let’s do some testing…

 ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.05

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

With just over 1GB/s read and just under 900MB/s write, the SL100 performs as expected and this type of performance out of such a small storage device is great to see.