Lexar's new SL100 Pro looks great thanks to a high-quality metal shell and a clean color theme that combines black with silver highlights. With 7 cm, it is shorter than most external SSDs because Lexar designed their own PCB for the SL100 Pro. Other vendors design only an M.2 to USB adapter, plug one of their currently shipping M.2 2280 SSDs into it, and wrap a case around it, which results in a length of 9 cm at minimum.

Unlike other vendors, Lexar does include a power and activity indicator, which is useful for when you want to be sure that activity has stopped and you can unplug the drive. Cables with USB-C and Type-A support are included—they are very short, though. Most desktop computers have their 10 Gbps USB port(s) at the back, so the included cable means you'll be crawling under your desk several times.

Sequential performance of the SL100 Pro is very good, especially sequential writes are high, which is important when you're copying a lot of data onto the drive. Sequential reads are high, too, which is just as important—you want to get your data out, too. Random IO on the other hand is surprisingly low. I reran the test several times with the same result. For the typical usage of an external SSD—carrying large amounts of data around—this won't be a problem. It will become a bottleneck when you plan to use the drive to launch games or applications from it. Here, the SL100 Pro will fall behind competing drives.

With $100, pricing of the Lexar SL100 Pro is in-line with expectations, but could be a little bit lower to have a stronger position against the competition, which has similar drives going for $90. I'd also love to see a larger version, 2 TB at least, for all the data hoarders out there.