Lexar 480GB NQ100 SSD Review

Shopping for SSDs can be difficult if you are trying to balance performance and price.  Generally speaking the fastest transfer speeds will give you the best performance but those can only be measured when moving large files.  In this review I went over a new Solid State Drive from Lexar called the NQ100.  The review drive features capacity of 480GB and is intended to be a mainstream storage solution that is not only affordable but offers decent performance. 

What I discovered during this review is that SSDs have matured enough that even drives designed for the mass market can offer better performance over “performance” drives from a couple years ago.  As the benchmarks showed the Lexar drive was slightly faster is most benchmarks and then took a commanding lead in UL PCMark 10 due to the amazing Random Read performance recorded in Crystal Disk Mark.  The good random performance can benefit overall system performance because it best represents how systems work in the real world where files are grabbed from all over the disk and in no particular order.

It is also important to understand that a drive intended for the “mainstream” market is not guaranteed to always use the same NAND or even the same controller, instead these drives are a way to offer affordable storage solutions while not restricting the manufacturer to specific components.  This is a cost saving measure that is ultimately passed on to the consumer and is not a bad thing.

Overall this drive offers some decent performance for the price and comes in three different and popular sizes.  240GB, 480GB and 960GB.  Each drive can deliver up to 550GB/s read and is quite durable offering shock and vibration resistance. 

For more information be sure to check out the new NQ100 series SSDs on the Lexar website

The Lexar NQ100 is available on Amazon, Pick yours up today.

Great Performance
SATA 6 Compliant
Extremely Good Random Reads
More Storage Less Cost

Nothing to mention