Re-launched in 2018 after the acquisition by the Chinese Longsys, the Lexar brand today markets memory cards, USB sticks, memory card readers and above all SSD hard drives. These include the 1TB SL100 Pro SSD, which we tested over the last week. It is a very light and compact external hard drive (it is 7cm long, 5cm wide, about one centimeter thick) with excellent read and write performance.
The hard disk is available in two sizes, 500GB or 1TB (the version we tested). The brushed aluminum outer shell has a simple and elegant design. The only port available on either short side is a USB-C 3.1, which enables sequential read and write speeds of up to 900 and 950MB / s claimed. Next to the USB-C post there is also a single blue LED that signals hard drive activity and is a bit difficult to see when connecting the hard drive with one of the two short cables supplied in the box. Not bad, but perhaps it would have made more sense to mount it in a more visible point of the body.
Aesthetic details and design aside, the strength of this SL100 Pro is the writing and reading speeds. We carried out some tests on a MacBook Pro (13 ”, 2018), after initializing the hard disk with APFS file system (the version arrives formatted as exFAT), a procedure necessary to make the disk readable on Apple computers.
Read and write tests carried out with the tool from video tool maker Blackmagic showed us average sequential read and write peak speeds of 833.5MB / s and 449.3MB / s, respectively. However, during the test, the recorded peak write speeds exceeded 700 MB / s. This figure was then confirmed by the Cross Platform Disk Test tool, which instead scored sequential read and write speeds of 742.2MB and 800.96MB.
We are quite close to nominal values, with above-average performance of the competition that certainly justifies the product’s “Pro” nickname. With these speeds, Lexar’s hard drive is suitable not only for the fastest saving of large files but also for hosting photo and video libraries for post-production with professional programs. The empirical evidence of saving and removing very large files confirmed the transfer speeds: to move a folder with 50 items for a total of 10.85GB (including audio files, 4k video and other files) it took us about 20, 88 seconds, with an average throughput greater than half a gigabyte of data transferred per second.
Finally, it should be noted that Lexar includes in the hard disk (or allows you to download from the site) the DataVault Lite encryption software, useful if you want to keep your data safe. In any case, the SSD is compatible with other encryption solutions, such as those offered natively on Mac, where the disk can be encrypted and password protected directly from the Finder.
With these write and read speeds, Lexar’s SL100 Pro is perfect for photographers and videographers who need to transfer a lot of files, but also for gamers who want to free up space from their PC (the speeds are for example sufficient to play without any problem holding the game files on the external hard drive). However, nothing prevents you from choosing one of these hard disks even for a simple backup of your computer, which thus becomes a very fast operation. In that case, however, an external SATA to USB SSD, with lower write and read speeds, is more than enough and can save you a few tens of euros.
