The Lexar SL200 Portable SSD is competitively priced at $120 for the tested 1 TB version, which makes it one of the most affordable USB-C high-speed external drives out there. It is of course more expensive than portable storage based on mechanical hard drives, but the SL200 is much faster. While traditional HDDs reach around 100 MB/s with very high seek times, solid-state storage achieves much better speeds. Another important argument for portable SSDs is that they have no moving parts, which essentially makes them completely immune to shock, vibration, and other physical forms of stress.

Unlike other vendors, Lexar does include an 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.

The SL200 achieves very decent sequential performance that's very close to what 2.5" SATA SSDs achieve natively when connected to a SATA 6 Gbps port inside your computer. This makes it a perfect match if you want to copy data to or from the SATA SSD in your computer—no point in having external storage that's much faster than what your internal drive(s) can handle. On the other hand, if you have a fast NVMe drive, you might want to consider portable SSDs with higher transfer rates—if you are willing to spend more to save some time.

While we saw good random read performance on the SL200, random writes are very slow, probably because the SL200 is a DRAM-less design. DRAM on an SSD is used as fast temporary storage for the drive's internal mapping tables, which translate between physical disk addresses as seen by the OS and the actual location of where the data is stored in the flash chips: "which chip, at which location." Using DRAM has a speed advantage as it operates much faster than flash, but it's a cost/performance trade-off. Since installing programs on a portable SSD or using it for some other kind of random write-heavy activity is highly unlikely, I think it's a very reasonable approach for a portable SSD.

Filling the whole drive completed at 200 MB/s, which isn't much for an SSD, but unless you move hundreds of gigabytes per session, this shouldn't be a big deal. The SL200 comes with a large pseudo SLC cache that can soak up incoming write bursts, so your effective write rates will be much higher than those 200 MB/s as long as your write load is smaller than the SLC cache or you have pauses in-between that give the cache some time to flush, which automatically always happens in the background.

As mentioned before, with a price of $120, the Lexar SL200 is very affordable for an external SSD. At the moment, many competing drives cost $140 or more, but some of them offer higher performance. If you're an enthusiast DIY builder, you could try to make your own external SSD with a standard M.2 NVMe drive inside a USB-C to M.2 NVMe enclosure. Those enclosures are quite affordable, and you get to pick which M.2 drive you use, which could be a potential upgrade path.