Lexar NQ100 SATA 2.5” 240GB SSD Review

Test Platform:
CPU       Intel Core i9-10900k
Mobo   Asus ROG Strix Z490-I Gaming
RAM      16GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200MHz
GPU       Nvidia RTX 2080 FE
OS SSD  Samsung 960 Pro 2TB

CrystalDiskInfo

Our drive connects at SATA-III 6 Gbps speeds and supports Native Command Queuing (NCA) as well as TRIM commands to keep performance levels high over prolonged use. We started out at 30C and only warmed up a couple of degrees during testing, so thermals will not be something you need to worry about.

CrystalDiskMark 7.0

“CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows measuring sequential and random read/write speeds.”

The default setting in CrystalDiskMark tests high queue depth sequential transfers, which look amazing on modern PCIe-based drives, but it doesn’t show the real picture. These Speeds look great and are not far from maxing out the SATA bus connection.

For comparison, here is an older 120GB hard drive test we found on a now-closed eBay listing, something you might find in any older laptop or desktop. The Sequential speeds boxed in red compared to the first row of our test, you can see the mechanical drive is around 8x slower. Sequential reads and writes will be something like copying files or maybe loading a game.
Random Queue depth 1 reads and writes (boxed in blue and the second row on our chart) aren’t even on the same playing field. This is going to be your daily use, your boot-ups, your spreadsheets, most gaming and online banking type of use. We see more than a 16,000% speed increase. Several orders of magnitude. THIS is what you will feel upgrading and it really does change the entire feel of a computer.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Atto shows the NQ100 doing 4K transfers at around 330MB/s for writes and 218MB/s for reads with full speed being achieved at the 128KB size and above. Speeds are flat-lined over most of the testing range which is a good sign.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Performance is about on par with the rest of our testing. Low latencies help land a surprisingly good score of almost 4700 points.

Black Magic Disk Speed Test

Disk Speed Test is an easy-to-use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high-quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. Disk Speed Test will continue to test writes and reads from your disk so you can evaluate both performance and readability over time.

Video editing is extremely demanding on a storage drive but Lexar’s NQ100 can handle most things with ease, not something you can generally say about the old ‘spinning rust’  this is intended to replace.