Lexar SL200 1TB Portable SSD Review
CrystalDiskMark, AJA System Test, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0h x64
CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) and shows the highest score of five runs.
CystalDiskMark:
Benchmark Results: The Lexar SL200 1TB drive is rated at up to 550 MB/s read and 400 MB/s write speeds in CrystalDiskMark. On our specific test system we were able to reach 568 MB/s read and 405 MB/s write! This is slightly above the drives rated speeds! This benchmark is great for ensuring that drives are able to hit their peak rated speeds.
Benchmark Results: When compared to other portable USB drives the Lexar SL200 1TB has the highest sequential read speeds for any SATA III based drive, but the sequential write speed is lower than many competing drives.
Benchmark Results: With the queue depth lowered to just one we found the Lexar SL200 1TB drive was capable of reaching 512 MB/s read and 394 MB/s write.
Benchmark Results: With the Queue Depth lowered to just one, the Lexar SL200 1TB performance pulled a bit on both sequential read/write workloads.
AJA System Test
AJA System Test:
AJA System Test by AJA Video Systems measures system disk performance using video test files of different resolutions, sizes and codecs. We selected the standard 4K UltraHD resolution, a test file size of 1GB and the ProRes 4444 codec to see how this drive does with regard to video rendering performance. ProRes 4444 is used for heavy effects work and deep color projects. We changed the default test file size from 1GB to 16GB to better represent real-world usage. The results from this benchmark help content creators with regards to rendering expectations, throughput, file read/write expectations for transfers and that kind of thing.
Benchmark Results: The AJA System Test results on the Lexar SL200 1TB portable drive showed that it was capable of 500 MB/s read and 356 MB/s write speeds. The write disk performance pattern showed that write performance dipping below 100 MB/s during the long sustained write test.
Benchmark Results: When compared to other portable SSDs the Lexar SL200 1TB drives low write speeds kept it at the bottom of the pack.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
Blackmagic Design has a storage drive benchmarking tool that customers can use to test the speed of your disk performance for working with high quality video at different resolutions and codecs.
Benchmark Results: The Lexar SL200 1TB portable SSD topped out at around 522 MB/s read and 350 MB/s write on the Disk Speed Test by Blackmagic. The results show that the SL200 should work great on 720P, 1080P and some 4K content. The SL200 is capable of running 2160p60 content using the Apple ProRes 422 HQ compressed codec, but struggles to run Cinema DNG RAW at higher frame rates at 4K. It is shown as not capable of running 10-bit YUV 4:2:2 video content at 4K as it is getting 15 FPS write and 23 FPS read.