Lexar Blaze Portable Gaming SSD Review

Lexar is a familiar name to many people, if you’re a professional or even a budding amateur photographer, then you’re probably more than aware of their products, as Lexar has always been a go-to brand for various memory cards and storage formats. However, they're now looking to shake things up a bit in the gaming market with Micro SD cards designed for portable gaming devices like the Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, DDR4 memory and more recently DDR5 memory kits too. Today we're looking at something a little different though. We've been sent the Lexar Blaze, a USB-powered portable storage drive designed specifically for gamers. What benefit would this have over a standard portable drive, and what would you use it for? Well, Lexar is advertising pretty impressive speeds for a portable drive, with up to 2000 MB/s read and 1900MB/s write speeds. Of course, the speeds you actually see will rely on the system and cables you are using, which is where I come in, using a pretty standard system to test the average performance of this drive to see how it actually works in the real world. Features Powerful NVMe SSD performance with USB 3.2 Gen 2x2Enhance your gameplay with vibrant RGB LEDsStylish as it is durableAdded security for peace of mindVersatile and convenient to use Packaging & Accessories First off is the front of the box, this has a pretty standard design; featuring everything that you'd care about for an SSD, including rated speeds and capacity. The back of the box is also a very standard affair, featuring more in-depth information about the products and the contents of the box. The side of the box is the simplest side, featuring a Lexar logo and a Blaze Logo. Removing an outer sleeve reveals a plain red box with a glossy finished Lexar logo in the middle. Opening the box presents us with the SSD itself, sitting in foam packaging with a pull string to pull it out easier. Under the blaze is another box that contains the accessories. The Accessories are all contained within a travel case for the drive. A Closer Look The drive has a pretty interesting design that features a hole at the top that could potentially be used to attach it to a lanyard or carabiner if you desired. The back of the drive is very unexceptional, with the capacity marked down along with the serial number and some certification logos. What's nice to see is that the drive runs off of a single USB type C cable plugged into your device. Also included is two cables, a USB-C to USB-C cable and a USB-A to USB-C cable, so you have all the potential options you might need for running this drive. The Blaze also comes with a stand to keep the drive upright on your desk. The stand is shaped to hold the drive very snug, so it doesn't easily slide out when you are plugging the drive in. Finally, in the box is the previously mentioned case, which contained the cables and stand. It's worth mentioning that when using the case for the drive you can only fit the drive and cables, there is not enough space to take the stand with you in the case. And of course, the most important part of all, the Blaze features RGB around the top; because without that it's not really a gaming product. Preparation The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn’t used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system. Data We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various fillage scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. The drive will be tested empty and at 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage for this area. We’re using Anvil’s Storage Utilities and CrystalDiskMark for this part of the review. Hardware Processor: Intel Core i9 12900KGraphics Card: XFX Speedster RX 6800 XT MERCMotherboard: ROG MAXIMUS X690 EXTREMERAM: Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5200Mhz 32GB(2x16GB)Storage: Seagate FireCuda 530 PCIe Gen 4 2TB M.2 (Primary Drive)Power Supply: NZXT C1000 GoldCase: NZXT H7 FlowCooling: NZXT Kraken Z73 RGB Software CrystalDiskMarkAnvil’s Storage UtilitiesATTO BenchmarkWindows 11 64 bit Our performance is going to be somewhat tied to the system and pots that we use when testing, so for the fairest chance, I used the included UDB-C to USB-C cable in a high-speed port on our motherboard. The performance we saw was good though, the read speeds we saw matched up to what we expected based on the advertised speed, but this test didn't do quite so well in the write speeds, but for a gaming drive the read speed is what is most important since you want the games stored on it to load faster. Here we see the Blaze getting much more performance in the write speeds than we did before, with the read speeds matching pretty well to what we saw before. What we saw here is performance that lines up pretty perfectly with what was advertised. In ATTO Disk Benchmark we saw the performance lining up with what we saw in Crystal Disk Mark, with the read speeds being as advertised and the write speeds falling a little behind. How Much Does it Cost? Coming in at $129.99 on Amazon US and £166 on Amazon UK, it's not the cheapest, but for convenience, it's pretty unbeatable, the addition of two included cables, the stand and a travel case help to offset the price a bit and make it a good option if you just want something to work out of the box on any device. Overview The performance was what we expected, matching with the advertised speeds in certain workloads is always nice to see, given that what the drive is plugged into makes a big difference to performance. Evaluating the drive is pretty simple then, it does what it advertises, is well-made with high-quality materials and includes everything you could need to use it. Where would you use this though? The answer is pretty simple since most people would want to use internal storage for their gaming PC, we know that it's not meant to be a permanent fixture on a computer. However, despite this, there are still many places this can be useful. For modern consoles it's a very easy way to expand your storage since it's plug-and-play, it could also come out cheaper than the official options. You may also want to use this type of drive if you frequent gaming cafés, the likes of which are very popular in Asian countries but do make appearances in the West. For us, this drive can be useful as extra game storage that can be easily moved from one system to another when we need to test a game on multiple systems Should I Buy One? If you only ever game at your desk or mostly buy physical copies of games on a console, then there are better options for you that will either perform better in a more permanent setting or cost less. But for those people who game on multiple systems, or have a lot of digital console games, or even like to game at internet cafés, then this drive could be the exact type of thing you are looking for. The included cables and travel case make it particularly appealing to those who go to cafés as it gives you the option to bring even more games with you so that you aren't limited by what the system can store.