Lexar Professional SL100 Pro Portable SSD Review

EVGA X99 Micro2 Motherboard
Thermaltake TT Premium cooling loop with hardline PETG tubing
Intel 5930K 6-Core Processor
16GB GSKill Ripjaws 3000Mhz Memory
MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X with clear nickel EK waterblock
MSI GTX 1070 Seahawk X
Samsung Pro 950 NVMe SSD
2TB Seagate Hybrid HDD
Thermaltake Smart Pro RGB 850w PSU
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Storage Tested
Lexar Professional SL100 Pro Portable 500GB

Reference Storage
HyperX Savage EXO 480GB SSD – SHSX100480G

For the benchmarks I have chosen to offer synthetic benchmark results that are repeatable and should provide a good basis for comparison.  This is external storage after all and while running PCMark 10 might be fun it wouldn't offer a realistic result.

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers can change depending on what hardware is being tested.  These were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 30.27.2020.1

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a freeware disk benchmarking utility that can test a variety of storage solutions from single hard drives to multi level RAID arrays and solid state disks.  The tests can be broken down to transfer sizes between 512B to 64MB with lengths between 64KB and 32GB.  Testing results are shown on a transfer chart with reads and writes clearly marked.

For our benchmark the 64MB transfer is being recorded even though the 128k range is often quoted as having the fastest transfer speed (range) of any drive.

Crystal Disk Mark is a widely available disk benchmarking program that can test a variety of different scenarios from Sequential to Random with Multiple and Single queues.

For our tests the Sequential and Random test with multiple queues and threads will be recorded.

External SSD performance depends on a number of factors and unlike internal drives can be hindered by cable length, USB chipset and even the type of processor you are using.  The Lexar SL100 Pro is quite fast and performs as well, if not better, than our reference drive and is leaps and bounds faster than your standard flash based USB drive which is really intended for read performance and tends to slow way down when it comes to writes.