Review

Packaging & Contents Dimensions & Weight Build Quality CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Speed Test ATTO Benchmark Speed Test AS-SSD Benchmark Speed Test Conclusion

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.

Lexar JumpDrive S23 USB 30 16GB Box Front
Lexar JumpDrive S23 USB 30 16GB 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.

Lexar JumpDrive S23 USB 30 16GB Length Ruler

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.

Lexar JumpDrive S23 USB 30 16GB Front
Lexar JumpDrive S23 USB 30 16GB Back

Test System

The test rig was a high end Core-i7 workstation kitted out with a 256GB Solid State drive and 16GB of RAM. The system was designed to be overclocked to 5GHZ but for the benchmarks, only the stock frequencies of 1.6GHz idle, 3.4GHz active and 3.8GHz turbo boost were used.
Motherboard ASUS P8Z68-V GEN 3
RAM Corsair Vengeance 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 (CML16GX3M4A1600C9)
Fixed Drive Corsair Performance Pro 256GB
CPU Intel Core i7-2600K
Operating System Windows 7

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

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

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

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.

Original Review by:  
Updated 11 years ago.  
Lexar JumpDrive S23 USB 30 16GB Front

Average Bench: 16.7% (283rd of 639)

Based on 500 user benchmarks.  Device: VID 05dc PID a833 Model: Lexar USB Flash Drive

The Lexar S23 is an extremely interesting value proposition. The sequential read/write speeds of 100/30 MBps are very respectable considering the exceptionally low price point for this drive. The most interesting feature of this drive by far is its random 4k random write speed of 1.1 MB/s, this figure is actually the third highest I have ever seen on a 16GB flash drive. Overall the S23 is not a stellar performer and looses to several faster USB 3.0 Flash drives but it is, however, a superb value for money proposition, the best I have seen in 2013 by some margin. [Jun '13 USBFlashPro]

Poor: 8%Average: 16.7% Great: 27%

Terrible average bench

The Lexar JumpDrive S23 USB 3.0 16GB averaged 83.2% lower than the peak scores attained by the group leaders. This isn't a great result which indicates that there are much faster alternatives on the comparison list.

Strengths

Avg. 4K Random Mixed IO Speed 0.95MB/s
Avg. 4K Random Write Speed 0.76MB/s

Very good consistency

The range of scores (95th - 5th percentile) for the Lexar JumpDrive S23 USB 3.0 16GB is just 18.7%. This is a relatively narrow range which indicates that the Lexar JumpDrive S23 USB 3.0 16GB performs reasonably consistently under varying real world conditions.

Weaknesses

Avg. Sequential Write Speed 17.3MB/s
Avg. Sustained Write Speed 18.7MB/s

Average Bench

(Based on 500 samples)
Min Avg Max
27.7 Read 65.2 108
4 Write 17.3 30
2.51 Mixed 19.8 44.7
12.8 SusWrite 18.7 26.6
33.2% 30.3 MB/s
Min Avg Max
2.74 4K Read 5.06 7.64
0.12 4K Write 0.76 1.4
0.19 4K Mixed 0.95 1.79
77.1% 2.26 MB/s
User Benchmarks BenchSequentialRandom 4kDeep queue 4k
The fastest USB (mainstream) averages a speed of 100%
7GB free, PID a833
Operating at USB 2.1 Speed
SusWrite @10s intervals: 19 17 17 17 17 17 MB/s
Read 66.8
Write 18.9
Mixed 26.6
SusWrite 17.4
36% 32.4 MB/s
4K Read 7.1
4K Write 0
4K Mixed 1.1
64% 2.73 MB/s
500 MORE »

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MSRP ≈ $15 @ launch in Jan '13
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 Comments

Faster File Transfer with USB 3.0 Technology...

LJDS23-16GASBNA

Added 11 years ago.

Liked

7 years ago.

Comment 

plastic build weak. —Sep '14


Liked

7 years ago.

Image  i23.photobucket.com/...
Crystal Mark Test Link

Crystal Mark Test Link

Comment 

I got seq read: 78, write: 37 and 4k random write of 1.05. This was only $10 and it is way faster than my Verbatim Store & Go 16GB and my Wintec Work & Play 16 GB. —Sep '14


Terrible

5 years ago.

build quality, very thin, it doesn't connect most of the time.


Poor

8 years ago.

Flimsy construction and retractable mechanism doesn't work very well.


Disliked

9 years ago.

Comment 

First of all: Rear logos are not "Conformitee Europeene" and "FCC Declaration of Conformity", they are "China Exported" and other fake chinesse mark. On their envelope says that can reach 100Mb/s but in all benchmarks i've done i've reached 20Mb/s write, 40Mb/s read on an usb 3.0 port. —Sep '14


Disliked

7 years ago.

Comment 

Plug is very bad, flimsy plastic, should have been made of metal. Most times will not make contact unless I wiggle it in the slot or it will disconnect on its own, in any PC I test it. Speeds are good as said above, but no use if it will D/C halfway. Came to this site to look for a alternative.—Sep '14


Average

11 years ago.


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