JumpDrive S23 USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Lexar s23 ships on a small cardboard sleeve with a plastic bubble wrap housing the body of the drive. On the front of the packaging Lexar claims read/write speeds of 100/30 MBps and there is a diagram of the included lanyard. On the back of the box there are brief details of the three year warranty and a small table indicating both Mac and PC compatibility.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The s23 measures 4.3cm long, 2.2cm wide and 0.6cm high which is very small for a flash drive. Weighing just 6 grams the s23 is also extremely light. Unlike a lot of flash drives there is little chance that this model will obstruct adjacent ports.

Build Quality

The s23 ships with a lanyard which can be threaded through a small slit at the bottom of the drive. The plastic is very thin and using the lanyard would be overly risky in our opinion. The s23 is brilliantly compact and can easily be kept in a shirt pocket but at the same time the plastic feels loose and flimsy and the retractable mechanism does not operate smoothly. Lexar could have done a better job in terms of build quality.

Front

Back

Test System

CrystalDiskMark Speed Test^[FAQ]

CrystalDiskMark is a free disk benchmarking utility that is very simple to use. It takes eight measurements: the read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MBps) for sequential, 512KB, random 4KB and 4KB parallel disk operations. There are more screenshots from this benchmark posted on the web than any other, probably due to its clean and simple display. There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drives, on the CrystalDiskMark wiki page.

CrystalDiskMark Score

The CrystalDiskMark scores for the Lexar s23 are above average. With a sequential read/write of 111.3/29.9 MBps the drive is around the middle of the pack for sequential performance. For medium and small file performance the s23 puts in a very solid performance and with a 4k random write speed of 1.1 MBps demonstrates way above average small file write ability. Overall the performance profile is well-balanced and demonstrates no obvious weaknesses.

CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Speed Test

ATTO Disk Benchmark^[FAQ]

The Atto Disk Benchmark has probably been around for longer than any other disk benchmarking software, and you can tell from its dated interface! The utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance but it's more than up to the task of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of file and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size. The results are displayed in megabytes per second (MBps). There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drive, on the Atto wiki page.

ATTO Benchmark Speed Test

ATTO Score

The ATTO scores for the s23 are broadly in line with its CrystalDiskMark scores and at 115/29 (read/write) MBps they come in reasonably in line with Lexar's indicated read/write speeds of 100/30 MBps.

AS SSD Real World Copy Speed^[FAQ]

The AS SSD benchmarking program was recently developed specifically for benchmarking SSD's. The utility is able to take several measurements that are well suited to solid state drives. One of the tests, ISO copy, is also relevant to slower storage devices including flash drives. The ISO copy test places two large 500MB files in a folder on the drive and then times how long it takes to copy the folder to another location on the same drive. The result is reported in both MBps and time taken. It's a real-world test that gauges a drives ability to read and write at the same time. Drives that have a good balance between their read and write speed fare relatively well on this test. There is further information, including instructions on how to use it to benchmark your own drive, on the AS SSD wiki page.

Real World Copy Speed Score

The real world copy speed test shows that the s23 would take 53.58 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB video file. This score is above expectations. Generally USB drives complete this test at roughly half their sequential write rates, the s23 beat that by approximately 33% achieving a score of 20.05 MB/s.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

We like the s23 a lot, it's the best value flash drive we have seen in 2013 by some margin. The key strength of the s23 is its well balanced and rounded performance profile, there are simply no weak spots at all. We particularly like the small file write performance offered by the s23, an area that Lexar drives do not usually excel in. Overall the s23 demonstrates slightly above average performance but it manages to do so at an exceptionally good price, a combination that serves the s23 well in our value for money rankings.

USBFlashPro
level
1,312

Original Review by:  
Updated 10 years ago.