Lexar SL200 1TB Portable SSD Review

Large File Transfer and Game Load Benchmarks

Real World File Transfer

The first custom test that we are going to do is to show how fast each portable drive can read and write a compressed folder. For this we backed up a Steam copy of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for the test file. The compressed folder was 30.5 GB in size and we moved it to the portable SSD and then performed read test of that file.

Benchmark Results: The Lexar SL200 1TB portable SSD actually did pretty well on this custom test as it finished with an average write speed of 257 MB/s write and 451 MB/s read. The older HP P600 1TB portable SSD features an older JMicron bridge chip that struggles to perform on our newer AMD X570 test platform, so the SL200 was able to move up as a result of that.

Our hardest test is to copy the entire the Call of Duty: Warzone game directory and to move it to the portable SSD. This file is just shy of 200GB in size and really hammers the portable SSD being tested as it is one long sustained write operation. Here the Lexar SL200 1TB drive does pretty well with an average speed of 290.7 MB/s.

Game Load Time Testing

Game Load Time Testing
To test game load times we used the benchmark for the game title Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers that was released in July 2019. We bumped up the resolution from 1080P to 1440P, but other than that we left all the settings at their stock values. Pretty much every SSD on the market today claims to be aimed at gamers, so this test shows you how the drives we tested perform on an actual game title in a series that every gamer has heard of.

Benchmark Results: When it comes to game load times the Lexar SL200 1TB drive finished with an average load time of 15.96 seconds. This is the third fastest time of the dozen portable SSDs that we tested and was unexpected after seeing it finish near the bottom in nearly every performance test that we ran.