Lexar Portable SSD

Lexar Portable SSD - Introduction As (semi-) professional photographers, as well as all round storage enthusiasts, there are a few things in life that are always in short supply: empty CF, SD, and XQD cards…. and storage to empty cards on to! In a perfect world when going to an extended photoshoot – be it a wedding, or just a family vacation – we would take two bags along. One for our lens and cameras, and the other filled with empty cards for those cameras. This is not a perfect world, far from it in fact; and while we can dump a certain number of cards worth of photographs to our laptop. Laptop internal storage is also at a premium. So what do we do? We do what everyone else does: we push files to external drives. Everything from Seagate Desktop monster enclosures, to more portable 2.5” GoFlex drives, to even (in a pinch) ‘thumb’ drives. All these workarounds come with their own unique problems and it is for this reason that an entirely different form-factor external storage solution can always be found in our camera bag – usually right next to our card readers. The storage device we are alluding to is none other than the Lexar Portable SSD. This portable device has the exact same form-factor as any of the Workflow card readers we rely upon, and is really meant to be used in conjunction with the Workflow Hub. However the Workflow Hub is not all that portable and usually we simply throw the proper card reader(s) and the Portable SSD into our bag and call it good enough. With sizes ranging from a decent 256GB to better 512GB the Workflow Portable SSD is more than spacious enough for a photoshoot and yet offers speeds that can keep up with cutting edge cards such as those XQD 2900X series. Equally important with prices ranging from $130 to $170 this model is not all that expensive when compared to other equally fast external storage solutions. In other words, it is big enough and fast enough to not handicap our work flow, yet is reasonably priced enough to be considered a necessity and not a ‘luxury’. Today we will be putting the smaller 256GB version under the microscope to show exactly what this model can and cannot offer consumers. Lexar Portable SSD - Specifications and Features Lexar Portable SSD - Closer Look at the Lexar Portable SSD While technically not part of the ‘Workflow’ lineup it did come as a surprise to see the shipping container was nothing like any of the previous Workflow card reader’s shipping containers. Instead of a clear plastic container with the top half housing the Portable SSD and the bottom half the accessories, Lexar has instead opted for a white cardboard box. This certainly affords the Portable SSD much more protection while at the same time being fairly attractive and attention getting. Whether you consider it to be superior to the Workflow series aesthetics will come down to personal preference – as both are good. On the truly positive side the back of the box – just as with the Lexar Professional series –lists both the read and write performance specifications. In the Portable SSD this means 450MB read and 245MB write – both of which are rather decent for a relatively large, portable flash drive in this price range. In either case, internally the box has the same dual chamber configuration as the Workflow series it really should be officially part of. To be specific when you open the box up you will be greeted with the drive sitting in a cardboard separator and the accessories tucked away underneath it. The accessories included are also classic Lexar Workflow series in that they consist of a long USB 3.0 Type-A to Type-B cable, and paper slip with a serial number for Lexar’s Image Rescue 5 software. Unless one takes a long and careful look at this model, anyone could be forgiven for thinking it was one of the various Lexar Workflow readers; however as this is not a card reader but a storage device, it is not technically a Workflow device. Though neither is it part of the Lexar Professional storage series as it is not a removable card meant for a camera or portable device. Instead this model carefully straddles both series and acts as a force-multiplier for both. This is why it has the exact same form-factor as the Workflow card reader models and has the same USB 3.0 Type-B port on the back. Really the only telltale hints that it is not a Workflow card reader – besides the ‘missing’ card slot on the front – is the grayer color instead of black, and the additional LEDs on the front. To be specific there are six LEDs on the front. The leftmost one glows when the device is connected and powered up – and acts as a status indicator much like on a router. The other five LEDs act as an instant capacity status indicator. When empty none will glow, when the drive is at 20% filled capacity one will glow, when at 40% two will glow, and so on and so forth. This way, with just a quick glance, consumers will be able to tell how much space is left on the Portable SSD. Unfortunately, as they are active and not passive status indicators you will only be able to – roughly – tell how much space is left by first plugging it in. Put another way, when powered off and in your camera bag there is absolutely no way to tell how full the Portable SSD is. This issue is not all that big a deal as this device really is not meant to be used as a standalone model. In fact, the designers did not envision using it like a large and chunky ‘thumb drive’, nor like a smaller external hard disk drive storage device. Instead this model was designed to be used in conjunction with Workflow card reader models. Specifically, it is meant to make life easier for professionals by offering a quick place to empty ‘filled’ cards during a photoshoot. However, to truly harness the power of this device consumers need to pair it with the Workflow Hub device. As it weighs more than most we recommend placing it in the bottom most slot and filling the other three with whatever Workflow card-readers are needed. When this is done, only a single USB 3.0 cable is needed and multiple cards can be simultaneously transferred to this external storage solution. While this is the ‘optimal’ use of the Lexar Portable SSD, this is not to say it has to be used in this way. Lexar’s designers did understand that not everyone can justify the price of the HUB HR1/HR2 models and as such many will simply opt to use two USB ports. One for this device and one for their card reader(s). This is why the underside of the Portable SSD has rubber inserts that keep it from needless sliding around on any smooth surface. Lexar Portable SSD - Image Rescue 5 Now in its fifth iteration the aptly named Image Rescue 5 program does exactly what its name implies. It rescues accidentally deleted images. Nothing more, nothing less. Weighing in at about 10MB of idle memory usage (and under 150MB during peak usage) Lexar's Image Rescue 5 is one of the lighter weight applications you will find in its class. Now don’t let this small footprint fool you, as this is a rather powerful program…it is just one that doesn't come with a lot of RAM filling nonsense. To be blunt, if you are looking for an all in one program that slices, dices, and juliennes fries, then this program is not for you. Instead if you are serious about your photography - and you obviously must be as you purchased a Lexar Professional card - then you will find this simple and easy to use program rather refreshing. Now to be fair, this program does not just restore deleted images it also allows you to format, and secure format your cards before you sell them or dispose of them. This however is the only concession to the 'more is more' fad that has been sweeping the industry for years now. On its own this program retails for $34, but honestly since it comes free with most of Lexar's recent Professional series we doubt many would have to purchase it separately. However, it is actually worth the cost as it and its predecessors have saved many a photo (and review deadline) over the years for us. To use this program all you need do is install the executable, type in the key that came with the card and plug in any memory card that you want to restore images from. Before we move on, making their Image Rescue program brand agnostic is impressive and will certainly come in handy if you have a bagful of SanDisk, and other brand cards. When you do run the program you will be greeted with a small and deceptively simple window that is about the same size as your typical pop-up window. It will automatically scan for attached memory cards and then wait for you to select the appropriate one. The scan will take some time, and will vary greatly depending on size of the card and the speed, but speed is actually the bigger determining factor. Thankfully with higher rated ‘X’ cards -like the SDHC 64GB 2000X - this process is a lot faster than it is compared to older generations. In either case during this process the Image Rescue 5 program will show you a basic status bar and tell you how far along it is in the process. It will not however tell you how much longer it will take to complete. Be patient, as there are 3 phases. Please understand that the more data blocks with actual data on them the longer the process will take, but in all likelihood the image thumbnail creation may take longer than the scan. Thankfully you can turn this feature off, but if you do all you will be presented with is a wall of blank thumbnails without any names. This is the largest weakness of the program, and if you use this 'feature' be prepared to restore all the images. Though to be fair, doing it that way is actually faster than waiting for thumbnail creation and choosing only a few images to restore. Either way Image Rescue 5 will ask you where you want to save the rescued images - and for obvious reasons the card itself is not an option. When done, thank your older self's foresight in installing this application, and make your future-self promise to never delete the wrong images again. With all that being said, the chances of success will vary greatly. On one end of the spectrum is a near guaranteed success rate and the other is almost guaranteed failure. Where your particular scenarios falls depends greatly on what you do once you realize your mistake, if you have formatted the card, and what camera you are using. This does take a bit of explaining, but it all boils down to the fact that the Image Rescue 5 program is not a miracle worker. If the cell blocks have been over-written your image is toast. So the sooner you do stop writing to the drive the better the chances of success are. However, unless the cell blocks are actually used you do still stand a great chance of getting at least some of the pictures back. Formatting the card however is an instant failure as TRIM command is baked right into the CFast standard so if you do this you will get the 'lost' images back. Needless to say, time is of the essence when dealing with accidentally deleted images, and just because you could restore images after a format from your first camera doesn't mean your new camera will be as accommodating. Lexar Portable SSD - Testing Methodology Testing external storage designed for use in cameras is not like testing solid state drives, or even compact storage devices like 'thumb drives'. These devices have very unique standards and have been optimized for highly specialized roles. For this reason, we have chosen to a combination of synthetic and real world tests that will show the intended customer base what the real strengths and weaknesses of a product line are. To this end we have chosen ATTO, AS-SSD, and Crystal DiskMark for our synthetic test suites. However, we have opted to no include any deep queue depth testing. Instead only the sequential, medium size, and single queue small file size tests are run. ATTO's full range of file sizes will be included but this only so that consumers can see the performance curves a given storage device offers. Furthermore, we will be significantly discounting any results under the 8K mark in ATTO. For real world we have opted for our usual real world transfer test. This is a two-part test. The first consist of timing how long a single 30GB (30 Billion bytes) .rar file takes to copy to, and then from the devices. The second consists of timing how long it takes to copy to and then from 15GB (15 Billion bytes) worth of small files (from 100kb to 200MB) with a total 36,000 files in 1200 subfolders. For the card reader we have opted for Lexar's WorkFlow USB 3.0 series. This series offers great performance, reasonable prices, and is specialized for a specific interface. IE each format has its own WorkFlow model that has been tuned for that particular storage type. In between each test run the storage device is wiped and ensured to be in a virgin state via manual TRIM'ing the device using AIS's FreeSpaceCleaner. All tests are run four times and only averages are shown. Main Test System Processor: Intel i7 5930K Memory: 32GB Corsair Ballistix DDR4-2666 Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X99 Cooling: Noctua U12S SSD: 1x Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD Power Supply: Corsair AX860i Monitor: Dell U2714H OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 Card Reader: Lexar USB 3.0 WorkFlow card reader Lexar Portable SSD - Test Results AS-SSD AS-SSD is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and small 4K read/write speeds as well as 4K file speed at a queue depth of 6. While its primary goal is to accurately test Solid State Drives, it does equally well on all storage mediums it just takes longer to run each test as each test reads or writes 1GB of data. As you can see the read performance of the Lexar Portable SSD is very, very good. Sadly the all-important, for this model and its niche, write performance is not as stellar. Instead it simply is best described as merely good. Crystal DiskMark Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5 and size at 100MB. Once again the Lexar Portable SSD posts very good read performance, but write performance that will bottleneck transfers even when dealing with even SD cards. The only time this will not happen is when CompactFlash cards are used. This model may need an upgrade in order to stay relevant. Real World Performance No matter how good a synthetic benchmark is, it cannot really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. To this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 30.00GB contiguous file, then a folder containing 1200 subfolders with a total 36,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (15.00 GB total). Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found. As with all the synthetic performance results the Portable SSD has very good read performance but only middle of the road write performance. This will handicap the overall appeal to this model, but this level of performance is still pretty darn decent – and will be a great upgrade from HDD based external storage solutions most professionals typically rely upon. Lexar Portable SSD - Performance Summary, Score Card and TL;DR Performance Summary In an effort to make sorting through all the results as easy as possible we have combined the results all of all the test results into an easy to digest summary format. By comparing this drive to similar products in all the various tests you will be able to easily find the result(s) you are interested in, see the improvement and decide if this model is worth the investment. As you can see it is pretty obvious that this model was designed around the aging CompactFlash standard performance levels and not modern XQD or even SD standards. We say this as while the Lexar Portable SSD has excellent read numbers its write performance is less than stellar. So much so that if you can afford to just buy more XQD/CFast/SD cards…. you should. By the same token, for the same amount of money you can get a lot more Portable SSD storage than you can in SD or XQD. Also on the positive side, the read performance is excellent and will make the eventual data dump to a computer a pain-free endevour. Score Card & TL;DR Accessories: 4 out of 5 Lifetime warranty and actually useful software is a good combination but one that could be even better. For example, a dust protector that the Workflow readers come with would have been nice. After all, dust can still clog up the USB 3.0 port. Read performance: 20 out 25 The read performance of the Lexar Portable SSD is certainly its strong point. By the same token it is not enough to even come close to saturating the USB 3.0 bus. Worse still compared to what some of the cutting edge card stadnards like CFast 2.0 (3600X) are capable of the Portable SSD does come off being a touch slow. Write performance: 30 out of 40 On the one hand this Portable SSD is indeed faster than any hard disk drive, but on the other compared to what even SD cards are capable of this SSD is downright slow. Considering the reason d’etre of this device is to allow professionals the luxury of quickly emptying the contents of a card to it… having said device be the performance bottleneck is not a good thing. Lexar desperately needs to upgrade this model to at the very least 400MB/s write performance. Anything less will simply not keep up with modern card’s performance. Warranty: 9 out of 10 Just as with the all Lexar models reviewed to date, the Lexar Portable SSD series come with a lifetime warranty that is backstopped by one of the largest NAND manufactures in the world: Micron. This means that the Lexar lifetime warranty is indeed a true lifetime warranty and will be honored for your lifetime and not the cards! The only minor issue is RMA'ing one may mean shipping it to the States. If you have a Micron RMA depot in your country, then you can consider this card a perfect 10. Value: 17 out of 20 While the shear performance of this drive leaves a bit to be desired the fact still remains it is costs nearly 600% less per Gigabyte of storage than XQD does. In other words, this is a downright inexpensive purchase and even with mediocre performance is still one heck of a bargain for professionals. Final Score: 80 out of a possible 100 TL;DR: The secret to this devices inevitable success is its relatively low asking price. While yes professionals can get better performance by simply using even more cards at a shoot, this device’s price per Gigabyte is hard to beat. So much so that a few extra seconds on transferring data from a XQD 2933X (or CFast 2.0) card is more than a fair trade-off. After all, the less professionals need to spend on temporary storage, the more they can spend on important things like prime lenses! Lexar Portable SSD - Closing Statement With its rather unique form-factor, the Lexar Portable SSD certainly will not be right for everyone and every scenario. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as instead of being the typical ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ external storage device the Portable SSD has been designed to be a master a few key areas, areas which somewhat overlap with the needs of the common consumer. This is however secondary, as form strictly follows function with this model and this has far reaching consequences, some good, some bad. First and foremost, this model has been designed from the ground up to be 100% compatible with the Workflow Hub models. Put simply this model will fit anywhere any of the other workflow card readers will fit, and can go anywhere they can go. For professionals this is a great boon, but for the average consumer this unique design may or may not be such a great fit. On the one hand it is chunkier than a flash drive, but slimmer than a Hard Drive based model. As such it really will depend on your needs and usage scenarios if you will consider the Portable SSD to be overly ‘portable’. The same holds true for the performance and capacity this model offers consumers. Compared to the typical flash drive the Portable SSD series is downright massive and faster than most. Conversely, compared to the usual hard drive based external drive most consumers use, the capacity is only decent but the performance is fantastic. Once again this duality means it will come down to what you prize the most: performance or capacity. In either case, this model is meant to be used mainly by professionals and here it excels. So much so that it truly is a force multiplier for professional photographers. Simply combine this plus three card readers (say CompactFlash, QXD, and either miniSD or SD workflow reader) in a Lexar Workflow Hub and the end result is a simple, if not cheap, solution that allows professionals the luxury of taking a lot of photographs without needing either a lot of empty cards, or a lot of internal storage on their Mac Book Air or other Ultrabooks. On its own however this model is still rather potent and can make life easier for professionals, so much so that some many not find the Hub’s benefits outweigh its negatives. This brings us to overall value and it is here that consumers will once again be split over the Portable SSD. For common consumers it really will come down to what they need an external storage solution to do. Some will love the speed it brings, while others who do not have an internal Solid State Drive will find its capacity lacking. On the other hand if you have bought into the Workflow idea this model darn near demands to be part of your setup. It will act as a force multiplier and will make getting on with the serious business of photography a lot simpler. As you can see consumers will need to think long and hard about their wants, their needs, and their desires before purchasing this model. Put another way, not everyone will like it but those who do, will like it a lot .

Lexar Portable SSD

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Lexar Portable SSD

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