Lexar SL100 Pro 1TB Portable SSD Review

Lexar Professional SL100 Pro Portable SSD

Micron stopped using the Lexar brand in 2017 and sold the Lexar branding and trademark rights later that year to Longsys, a Shenzen, China-based flash memory company. The Lexar brand was then re-launched in 2018 with the introduction of new memory cads, card readers, SSDs, and USB flash drives. Legit Reviews hasn’t reviewed any products from Lexar since the ownership change, but we’ve recently made the right connections and will be looking at Lexar memory storage products once again. The first product that Lexar sent over to us to review is the Lexar Professional SL100 Pro Portable SSD. If that sounds familiar it might be due to the fact that it was released over a year ago! This isn’t exactly a new product, but it is still Lexar’s flagship portable Solid-State Drive (SSD) and widely available on the market.

The Lexar Professional SL100 Pro Portable SSD series is available in 500GB and 1TB capacities. Both capacities bus-powered USB 3.1 Type-C storage devices that deliver up to 950 MB/s sequential read and 900 MB/s sequential write speeds. It also supports 256-bit AES encryption and comes with software to help protect your files securely. Pricing starts at $99.99 shipped for the 500GB model (LSL100P-500RB) and goes up to $179.99 shipped for the 1TB model (LSL100P-1TRB). So, you are looking at about $0.18 to $0.20 per GB of storage space. Both models are backed by a 3-year limited warranty.

The exact model that we’ll be looking at today is the Lexar Professional SL100 Pro 1TB Portable SSD. It comes in started retail packaging along with both USB Type-C to Type-C and USB Type-C to standard USB Type-A cables. Performance is the same on both cables as you’ll be able to reach up to 950 MB/s speeds as long as you are connecting it to a system that has a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port.

The SL100 Pro is fairly compact at 55.0 x 73.4 x 10.8 mm (2.165″ x 2.89″ x 0.425″) with a weight of just 70.5g without the cable. It will easily slip into your pocket and is most certainly small enough to get lost in a backpack or purse. When it comes to build quality, the SL100 pro seems be designed and built with a black and silver brushed aluminum finished housing. Nothing rattles and there are no visible screws on the enclosure. The end caps are obviously the entry point to the metal body, but they are not designed to be customer serviceable. We’ve been told that Lexar is using the Marvell NV1160 SSD controller and the JMicron JMS583 USB 3.1 Gen2 to PCIe Gen3x2 bridge controller.

On one of the end caps you’ll find the USB 3.1 Type-C port as well as the blue LED activity light. This is mainly so you have a visual notification to let you know that your file transfer is done. The front of the drive has a large Lexar logo on it and the back of the drive has a smaller logo along with capacity, serial number, model number and other general information.

The Lexar Professional SL100 Pro 1TB portable SSD comes out of the box with the exFAT file system and pre-loaded with ENC DataVault Lite software. Mac users will want to use Disk Utility to format the drive and switch over to GUID / Mac OS Extended or GUID / APFS.

ENC DataVault security software lets you easily determine the level of protection: Basic encryption (AES 128 bit), or AES-based Pro Encryption (256, 512 or 1024 bit). Enabling encryption technology is optional, but will help protect your data if you ever happen to lose the drive. It also works with Windows BitLocker, so you can use other encryption software.

Before we look at the numbers, lets take a brief look at the test system that was used on the next page!