Lexar 256GB Portable SSD Review

Performance

Performance has been measured using popular benchmarks. Test setup is based on an Intel Skylake platform which contains MSI Z170I Gaming Pro AC motherboard and Core i7 6700K processor. All tests were performed on Intel USB 3.0 controller.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Maximum bandwidth of Lexar Portable SSD is clearly limited by USB 3.0 maximum bandwidth. Even though I used the fastest controller I could find then it can’t pass ~434MB/s. We could see similar situation while testing other fast USB 3.0 storage devices.

Sequential write results are about 6MB/s higher than these declared by Lexar so all is fine. Final results after couple of runs in ATTO Disk Benchamark are 434MB/s read and 251MB/s write. Simply great results for USB 3.0 storage.

CrystalDiskMark 5.1.1 x64

In CrystalDiskMark results are nearly the same. Slightly lower maximum read than in ATTO but higher write.

Above you can see results at various test files. In all cases performance is about the same.

Random bandwidth is quite low for SSD. I’m not sure if it’s because of USB 3.0 interface or something else as we had no chance to test more SSD connected via USB port. I would expect something about 20MB/s in random 4K read while results are about 13MB/s. We won’t install operating system on this drive so I guess it won’t change much.

 AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD results are as usuall lower than CrystalDiskMark, even though both benchmarks seem to perform similar tests.

Bandwidth results are good and I wouldn’t look at the final score in this case. What counts the most are sequential read and write but also random 4K results.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Results in Anvil’s Storage Utilities are somewhere between CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD. We can see high sequential bandwidth but also quite average random 4K results. Not much has changed while switching test files to bigger. I could say that differences between used test files were about the same as we could see in CrystalDiskMark so about 1MB/s give or take.

Maybe let’s move to the next benchmark which is showing general performance in various popular applications.

PCMark 8

Final score in PCMark 8 is 4489 what is great result. However I’m not sure how it’s counted as faster drives achieve about the same results. On the other hand average storage bandwidth is 69.94MB/s. This includes mixed workload so both sequential and random transfers. We have to remember that in daily work storage is using more often random operations. Considering this fact I can say that general performance of Lexar Portable SSD is really good.

Even though I wish to see higher random 4K bandwidth, Lexar Portable SSD is providing great performance for an USB 3.0 storage device. All who are looking for a large drive which can move data really fast and what more is able to work on all files without delays will be satisfied with Lexar Portable SSD performance.