Lexar S45 64GB USB3.0 flash drive review

Review: Lexar
S45 USB3.0

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Reviewed by: Antonis
Sapanidis

Provided by: Lexar

Manufactured: in Korea

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In my personal life I have used a few of
those very small USB3.0 flash drives from various manufacturers, and most of
the will do the job but they will usually have some drawbacks that I don’t like.
Some of them will be very slow when it comes to write speed, some don’t have an
LED, and some of them, although very few to be honest, have very bad build
quality. There I was ready to give up on those small USB flash drives, but I
came across the Lexar S45, as a small USB3.0 flash drive  which could potentially
solve most of the problems that I had. Good build quality is always one of the
very first things that I want, after that I need good write speed, and the
Lexar S45 promises to achieve acceptable write speeds, thankfully Lexar has also
put in an activity LED. There's not much more to ask for, and I don’t need much
else to watch movies at home or listen to music in the car.

By now I am sure that most of our readers are
familiar with Lexar, but if you happen not to know them you can always visit
their website to learn more about their products and their history, simply by
clicking here.

Now we can start this review by taking a
look at the Lexar S45 USB3.0 flash drive package.

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Lexar S45 64GB USB3 flash drive, packaging and specifications


Let's take a closer look at the packaging
of the Lexar S45 USB3 flash drive.

The front is simple, it has all the
information that we need about the S45, and in the middle there is the drive.

 

A closer look at the Lexar S45 USB3 flash
drive.

Something that was missing from similarly
sized drives that I have previously tested was an LED, and yes behind the white
plastic there is a blue LED.

Specifications

Let's take a look at the specifications for
the Lexar S45 as they appear on the website.

We can see that the drive is a USB3.0 and it’s
available in four sizes, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB. They are also available
in different colours, with a three year warranty, and all of them come with the
EncryptStick software.

Keep in mind that there are some
differences in the write speed, the 16GB will only do 20MB/sec, the 32GB will
go up to 30MB/sec, and the 64GB and 128GB will reach a maximum speed of
45MB/sec. The read speed for all of them is identical, 150MB/sec.

Before I start testing the Lexar S45 flash
drive let’s find out what's inside using the Flash Drive Information Extractor
tool.

Here we can see that the Lexar S45 uses the
Silicon Motion SM3267 controller. The tool wasn’t able to provide any info
about the memory, but we are sure that it’s made by micron.

Now it's time to start testing the Lexar
S45 and see what speeds it can achieve in real world tests, but first I will
start with the a few synthetic benchmarks.

 

Now let's start testing the drive with
the NTFS file-system...

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