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Review: |
Storage technology is moving forward at
very fast rate, not only we are able to have more speed and more capacity, but
we also get smaller size, and at a lower price. Lexar is doing all of that, and
here at Myce I was fortunate to review the Lexar
Triton Jumpdrive, a flash drive that for me is still the best drive that
you can buy. Okay, it might not be the fastest drive on the market, but is
still one of the fastest flash drives and it has outstanding build quality.
Now I am taking a closer look at the S23
Jumpdrive, and this time Lexar is providing a more affordable USB3 flash drive,
that not only continues to have very good performance, of up to 100MB/Sec read
and 55MB/Sec write, but also continues to have a very stylish look. The Lexar
S23 Jumpdrive comes in four colours - an 8GB in orange, a 16GB in teal, a 32Gb in
green and a 64GB in purple. All models are covered by a three year Warranty.
You can find out more about Lexar simply by
clicking here.
A first look at the drive and its specifications
As you can see the package is very simple,
and it has all the information that you need to know about the S23 Jumpdrive.
The
front side,
and
here is the back of the package.
When
closed, front of the Lexar S23, reveals the capacity,
And when
it’s opened you will see that it signifies it is USB3.0, also in the triangle
there is an orange LED.
Specifications
Firstly, here is a look at the specifications
of the Jump Drive as they appear on the official website.
As we can see the drive is able to achieve
100MB/Sec read speeds and up to 55MB/Sec write speed, depending on the capacity
of the drive.
Now let's start our tests with the FAT32
file-system...
Test system and test procedures
For this review I will be using a PC with
the following configuration.
PC
- MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte P55A-UD4 (NEC USB3 Chipset)
- CPU: Intel
i5-750 @ 3.4GHz - CPU COOLER: Corsair A70
- RAM: 8GB Kingston
HyperX - VGA: ATI
Radeon HD 5670 - HDD1: OCZ
Vertex 2 60GB (OS Drive) - HDD2:
Samsung Spinpoint 1TB (storage)
Testing methods
I will try to keep my testing methods as
simple as possible and repeatable on various systems. I will run two simple
benchmarks, ATTO and CrystalDiskMark, as both tools can give a
good impression of how the drive performs. I will also run these benchmarks
with the two most common file systems that most users use, the older and more compatible
file system FAT32, and NTFS which is the current standard that
has a lot of benefits over FAT32. There will also be some real life
tests, simple tasks such as copy/paste and also a compatibility test with a
list of various consumer devices that most people will use in or out of their
homes.
FAT32 Tests
So let’s see how the Silicon Power Marvel
M60 performs, with the FAT32 file-system.
ATTO
My first test will be running the ATTO to
give an idea of the sequential performance of the flash drive.
Starting with ATTO and we can see that the
drive reaches a read speed of 111MB/Sec and a write speed of 51MB/Sec. Very
nice results to start my tests.
CrystalDiskMark
This time we can get a more detailed view of the performance of the
Lexar S23 Jumpdrive. Again the drive is delivers a very good performance. You can
see how the S23 compares to some other USB3 flash drives I have tested in the
following graph.
Here you can see the read
results,
and here are the write results.
Conclusion
The Lexar S23 Jumpdrive is delivers very
good performance.
Let’s move to the next page and test the
drive with the NTFS file system...
NTFS Tests
Again I will be starting my tests with
ATTO, so let’s see how the Jump Drive performs with the NTFS file-system.
ATTO
Not much changed when the drive was
formatted with NTFS. Again it was able to reach its maximum read and write
speed without any hassle.
CrystalDiskMark
This time we can see that there is a big
improvement in the 512K write speed, the rest are again very close. Again you
can compare the S23 with the rest of the drives that I have tested, in the
graph below.
Again
I present first the read speeds,
and then
the write speeds.
Conclusion
As we can see there is an improvement in
the 512K write tests, but for me the main reason to have your flash drive
formatted with NTFS is the ability to have files larger than 4GB.
Let’s move to the next page for some
real world tests ...
Real world tests
Benchmarks are great, as they can give a
very good view of how the drive can perform when it’s pushed to the maximum.
Unfortunately they only tell part of the story, the rest you have to find out
when you're using the drive for everyday tasks. I've therefore decided to
perform three simple tests that almost everyone does, so that I can get a
better view of the performance of the drive.
For this test I will be moving all the test
files from a RAM disk to the tested USB drive, and vice versa, below you can see
the results.
MP3
I will start my tests by performing a
simple copy of 1.36GB of MP3s. You can see the result for the Lexar S23
Jumpdrive in the graph below.
The Lexar S3 has great performance. It
needed less than 15 seconds to copy all the test files to the RAM disk, and
also less than 36 seconds to write all the test files to the Lexar S23.
Pictures
For the next test I will copy 3377 assorted
picture files with a total size of 2.56GB.
The Lexar S23 is the second fastest drive
in this test, simply excellent performance.
Movie
I finished my tests by copying an MKV file
and an SRT file, the two files have a total size of 3.46GB
Finishing my tests for the Lexar S23, we
can see that the S23 is the third fastest drive, overall the Lexar S23 is giving
excellent performance.
Compatibility
This is a simple test, in which I will
simply plug the Lexar S23 Jumpdrive into various devices, two PCs, a laptop, a
netbook, one mini Hi-Fi, a media player, and two TVs, to check the
compatibility. So let’s see if the Lexar S23 Jumpdrive works on all these
machines.
The Lexar S23 Jumpdrive had no issues with
any of my equipment.
Conclusion
Our enterprise reviewer JReynolds commented on one
of my previous reviews: “I feel it's becoming increasingly difficult to
differentiate between the performance of client/consumer drives.” I
know that he was referring to SSDs but I personally feel that differentiating a
low/mid cost USB3 flash drive is becoming even harder.
In this case it’s clear that the Lexar S23
can’t directly compete with the Triton Jumpdrive. The Lexar S23 is a very fast
drive, it's small which makes it easy to carry with you, and at the same time
it’s colourful and visually appealing. Coming back to small, the price that you
will have to pay for the Lexar S23 is also small , in Greece the S23 starts at
7€ for the 8GB and for the 16GB, 32GB, and 64Gb, the prices are 16€, 22€, and
43€. As we can see the pricing is very aggressive.
The only negative with the drive is the low
quality plastic, but once you have used the Lexar Triton Jumpdrive nothing
feels the same anymore, and at this price I can’t complain.
Positive:
- Very well priced for the speed that it
offers. - Colourful.
- Small size.
Negative:
- Plastic
“Let’s be honest, there are several to
ways to look at a flash drive, one is to simply looks at the numbers, and the
other is to look for what you find attractive. The Lexar S23 comes very close
to both. It has the looks and the performance, it's also a small size, and has a
small price. It’s quite comprehensive.”
For the colourful look and also the very
good read/write speeds I give the 'Very good' award to the Lexar S23 Jumpdrive.
