Lexar SL100 Pro Portable SSD Review

Introduction Lexar’s SL100 Pro portable SSD fills an important niche where users need to keep their data close and access it quickly. Whether you are a content creator sitting in a coffee shop editing video or a professional working with large data sets between meetings, the need for high-speed access to your data is at an all-time high. While it seems everything now has a cloud-oriented solution, today's mobile-oriented world doesn’t always allow the level of access you need. Lexar’s SL100 Pro provides pocket-sized access to everything you need at speeds that leave most USB drives far in the rear-view mirror. The SL100 Pro utilizes SuperSpeed USB 3 10Gbps to enable sequential speeds of over 900MB/s in both reads and writes. PC Test Bench would like to thank Lexar for providing us with a sample of the SL100 to test out. About Lexar: Lexar was split off from Cirrus Logic in 1996 in San Jose, California, and manufactured flash storage products including SD and CF memory cards, USB flash drives, and Solid-State Drives. Lexar was later acquired by Micron in 2006 and continued on until 2017 until parent company Micron announced it would discontinue its retail removable media storage business and put it up for sale. Lexar branding and trademark rights were purchased by China-based memory company Longsys. Superior speed when accessing your content on-the-go Quickly and securely store and access your content anywhere with the Lexar® Professional SL100 Pro Portable SSD. With sleek, slimline styling and a premium aluminum finish, it provides superior performance on the go, with speeds up to 950MB/s read and 900MB/s write. Available in 500GB and 1TB capacities. FEATURES Superior SSD-level performance, with speeds up to 950MB/s read and 900MB/s write1 Sleek, slimline styling with a premium brushed aluminum finish Durable, portable design resists harsh temperatures and vibration Includes 256-bit AES encryption software solution to protect files securely Features a USB Type-C port, and includes both USB Type-C to Type-C cable and USB Type-C to Type-A cable Three-year limited warranty SPECIFICATIONS Color Black Capacity 500GB, 1TB Interface USB 3.1 Type-C Speed Up to 950MB/s read, up to 900MB/s write System Supported Mac® OSX 10.6+, Windows® 10/7/8 Standard USB (Type-A or Type-C) port Operating Temperature 0°C to 70°C Storage Temperature -40°C to 85°C Dimension (W x L x H) 55 x 73.4 x 10.8 mm / 2.165” x 2.89” x 0.425” Weight 70.5g / 0.155lbs（Without Cable） A Closer Look One of the first things you notice about the Lexar’s SL100 is how small it is. The packaging is barely big enough to hold a standard 2.5” SSD. Inside, you’ll find the SL100 Pro portable SSD and a pair of USB cables. The drive itself uses a USB Type-C and comes with a cable to connect to other USB Type-C devices as well as a standard Type-A for compatibility with almost everything you’ll come across. The SL100 Pro is tiny, measuring about 2 inches by 3 inches, or 55 x 74mm and less than 11mm thick. The outside is mostly black anodized brushed aluminum, with chrome end caps. The Lexar logo is silk-screened on in white. The back has the capacity and serial number, as well as some regulatory markings. One end has the Type-C port, as well as a tiny pin-hole that lets a blue power and activity light to shine through in use. Under the Hood Lexar’s SL100 Pro really isn’t meant to be user repairable. There are no visible fasteners, you have to peel the metal stickers off of each end to get to the 4 screws that hold the internal sled into the one-piece extruded metal shell. The internal PCB has a piece of felt on the side with all of the chips initially to prevent shorts against the aluminum shell. The backside has a thick thermal pad covering most of the PCB. Although, there is almost nothing under it. The 500GB model only has two 256GB NAND modules on the front, but there are two pads here for another pair for the 1000GB model. On the front side, a JMicron JMS583 USB 3.1 Gen2 to PCIe/NVMe bridge IC provides the bridge from USB to PCIe. A Marvell 88NV1160 quad-channel controller takes advantage of the provided PCIe 3.0 x2 interface to connect to either TLC or QLC flash, in this case, the former. A pair of 256GB Micron 64L TLC NAND flash chips hang off of the Marvell controller to provide 512GB of physical capacity, before 12GB of overprovisioning. Software ENC Security’s ENCDataVault Lite Like most people, you keep a treasure trove of private information, on your computer or other storage devices, that may include important documents, photos, videos, financial records, and other sensitive data that make up your digital life, and that deserve the protection you would want to have for any property you own. Each and every day, cybercriminals are at work, hacking into computer systems and making off with private files and sensitive information. Now, with ENC Security Software, you have a simple to use program, with all the tools needed to protect your important files and data from unauthorized access and malicious or criminal misuse. The possible consequences of information falling into the wrong hands: identity theft, embarrassment, job loss, or worse... will no longer be your concern, when you take the few seconds needed for ENC Security Software to permanently secure all your important documents and sensitive data. Whether you are securing your vital information on your desktop, laptop, flash drive, or some other storage device, With ENC DataVault Security Software you can now have peace of mind and full control of your digital life. When you first run the portable ENCDataVault, it will ask you to set a password and reminder phrase. Subsequent runs will ask you to log in. Once inside, you’ll see your ‘Flash Drive’ Vault Door on the top. Double-clicking it will open the secured area of your SL100 Pro. Once inside, you can drag files in and out. Your encrypted files will show in the window while logged in, but nowhere else. Under Tools > Options, you have the option of different encryption levels if you have the full version. We all know things can happen to portable drives, whether it falls under the car seat or you leave it at your work desk, sometimes you need your files still. ENC keeps a local copy of your data backed up, or multiple revisions if you want. If you want the increased feature set, hitting the button top and center in the window will take you to the ENCSecurity website where you can buy the full version. Testing Test Platform: CPU Intel Core i9-9900k Mobo Asus ROG Strix Z390-I Gaming RAM G.Skill TridentZ RGB GPU Nvidia RTX 2080Ti FE OS SSD Samsung 960 Pro 2TB Comparison Drives: Crucial X8 1TB Orico GV100 512GB Out of the box, Lexar’s SL100 PRO 500GB drive comes with 465GB usable space under its default exFAT formatting with the DataVault software occupying a scant 25MB of that. CrystalDiskInfo USB Mass Storage drivers are very universal but are garbage for performance. We are pleased to see that Lexar’s SL100 Pro can take advantage of USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) to encapsulate NVMe for maximum performance. A couple of quick tests warms the drive up very quickly to the mid to upper 40C range, but it levels out quickly and stays there, which is a good thing for NAND longevity, it likes to be warm. Not hot, but warm. Sequential Testing – Variable Queue Depth Sequential speeds start around 425MB/s for reads and around 390MB/s for writes at QD1. We see a slight dip at QD2 and then things shoot up at QD4. Most users will never get above QD2, and that’s mostly while writing and reading from the drive simultaneously. Random Testing – Variable Queue Depth Random performance is really good on the write side, but reads don’t climb with queue depth. Simultaneous mixed-use, made up of 70% read and 30% write is also held back by reads. We would expect the larger 1TB model to perform better on reads as it has more NAND flash modules to distribute the commands to at one time. 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." Since not every computer has USB gen 2 ports (10Gbps) available, we also test on a 5Gbps port. The reduced USB bandwidth really doesn’t have much of an impact on random performance, but realistic QD1 sequential performance will show a noticeable impact. We see random write performance climb pretty significantly, with sequential performance coming in at respectable levels at both USB 5gbps and 10gbps speeds. Mixed testing is tough on many drives and we see a noticeable impact. USB 3.x has an advantage over older drives as it supports Full-Duplex communications in contrast to older USB 2.0 drives that can only handle half-duplex. The controller on the SL100 Pro doesn’t handle this quite as well as some competing (and more expensive) models but still provides respectable performance. PCMark 10 Storage Test PCMark 10 introduces a set of four storage benchmarks that use relevant real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the latest modern drives. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The Data Drive Benchmark is designed to test drives that are used for storing files rather than applications. You can also use this test with NAS drives, USB sticks, memory cards, and other external storage devices. Lexar’s SL100 Pro does a decent job on both PCMark 10 Storage tests we use. The System drive emulates common tasks from real-world programs and will make heavy use of random mixed transfers. Here, the SL100 Pro averages ~115MB/s while the more sequential oriented ‘Data Drive’ testing patterns creep up to nearly 140MB/s. ATTO Disk Benchmark ATTO indicates higher than rated performance on reads and close to rated performance on writes. It’s always nice to get a little more than you were expecting! Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil’s Storage Utilities has been around quite a few years now, but still provides a good look at many aspects of SSD’s including latency and IOPS. It provides a benchmark score that is easy to compare between drives. 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. One real-world use case of a portable SSD is content creators editing video on the go. This requires a minimum sustained performance level specific to each codec and resolution. Black Magic’s Disk Speed test checks many common ones and Lexar’s SL100 Pro easily sustains enough read and write performance for all of them. Drive Thermals It took about 30 minutes of continuous testing to get the SL100 Pro to the hottest temp we saw, around 60C. It wasn’t enough to throttle, but was noticeably warm to the touch, enough so you wouldn’t really want to put it in your pants pocket immediately after use. Final Thoughts & Conclusion Lexar’s SL100 Pro is one very capable solution to needing performance on the go. In many scenarios, the SL100 Pro exceeds the rated speeds. While low queue depth performance is a little lower than some comparable drives, the price is too. The 500GB model brings around $100 on the street with the 1TB version landing around $190 or so. Even though it didn’t top the charts on every test, it still was no slouch either. The performance was consistent with only the most brutal sustained workloads heating up the drive, but it never reached the point of throttling. The tiny size, even smaller price tag, and solid performance make the SL100 Pro easy to recommend to anyone needing flexible, portable, and high-speed storage.