INTRODUCTION

    Testing portable media since 2008 means that I feel both good and bad about the current state of the consumer industry. Good because storage capacities and speeds have increased exponentially since back then and bad because at the same time manufacturers aren't increasing capacities fast enough, at least not as fast as I was expecting. With the enterprise market enjoying even 100TB SSDs for example it's strange to see that the consumer market has been pretty much stuck at 8TB for the past 5 years or so (excluding a handful of drives with two 8TB SSDs in RAID). On top of that it's really hard to even find portable SSDs that feature such capacities and well, by now I was expecting at least 16-20TB SSDs (both internal and portable) to have made their appearance in the consumer market. That being said at least we still have performance to be happy about and the latest ARMOR 700 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Portable SSD by Lexar is among the fastest models one can buy today.

    For more than 25 years, Lexar has been a trusted leading global brand of memory solutions. Our award-winning lineup includes memory cards, USB flash drives, card readers, solid-state drives and DRAM. With so many options, it’s easy to find the right Lexar solution to fit your needs. All Lexar product designs undergo extensive testing in the Lexar Quality Labs with more than 1,100 digital devices, to ensure performance, quality, compatibility, and reliability. Lexar products are available worldwide at major retail and e-tail stores. For more information or support, visit www.lexar.com.

    The ARMOR 700 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Portable SSD by Lexar is currently available in 1/2/4TB capacities, two colors (black and navy blue), sports an IP66 certified enclosure (water and dust resistant) and supports Apple Pro Res recording (4K @ 60fps). Under the rubber sleeve covering its aluminum enclosure Lexar has placed the same quad-channel (32 CEs) SM2320G NAND flash controller by Silicon Motion we've seen with quite a few models in the past (including some also by Lexar). The SM2320G NAND controller fully supports Silicon Motion's latest NANDXtend ECC end-to-end data path protection together with real time AES 256-bit encryption for full compliance with the Trusted Computing Group (TCG Opal 2.0 specification). As for NAND flash just like other manufacturers Lexar has also gone with 128-layer 3D TLC NAND, this time however by YMTC. Finally, Lexar bundles their DataShield password protection software and covers the entire ARMOR 700 line with a very generous 5-year limited warranty.