Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The Lexar SL660 represents a significant advancement in Lexar's high-speed portable gaming SSDs. While the SL660 is designed for gamers this is for power users that want a storage device with a fast interface to save more of their favorite stuff and move data fast and furious. Gaming-wise, admittedly .. the Lexar SL660 Blaze is an exceptional choice for an external secondary drive to supplement the capacity of your gaming rig or console. It's RGB lighting adds a splash of color to any gaming setting. The product retains shock resistance but is a little big and a bit heavy perhaps. This makes it less portable in certain ways, but the metal body and general style make it more appealing. Furthermore, it is still fairly convenient.

Concluding

As you can see, we had a bug in writes, and performance remained limited at ~450 MB/sec, whereas reads perform close to 2 Gb/sec at USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. We tested this with three motherboards, and all got the same results. even a replacement SSD did not solve this issue. When we connected towards a USB 3.2 10 Gbps connection, all worked fine as we'd hit close to 1 GB/sec values. We're not sure what was happening; we do know some reviews out there (mostly done with a USB 3.2 2x2 compatible laptop) performed and brought the proper numbers you may expect.  That 450 MB/sec marker for writes still is plentiful, though nowhere even close the advertised values. So let's wrap it up. The Lexar SL660 Blaze offers a lot, including a USB 3.2 Gen2x2 interface, a removable stand for aesthetics, 256-bit AES encryption software, and a 5-year limited guarantee. This is being touted as a gaming drive, which doesn't mean much in the SSD world right now. On the other hand, the angular design and presence of RGB are likely adequate to meet the requirements of such a name. The retractable stand is also a good feature when contemplating the potential of portable gaming, even when utilized with a console. Apart from a few small flaws, the SL600's performance is really good for a portable drive. The one area where it falls short is under persistent, sequential write workloads, where post-cache performance could potentially be lacking.  While we do feel the market is oversaturated with gaming-oriented SSDs that are just an excuse to spend extra for aesthetics and semi-useful functionality, we do have to say that this one is properly fast; it meets the high throughput promised by USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (if your hardware supports that standard) and performed well in multiple scenarios we fired off at it. Gaming wise, one disadvantage could be that it has a maximum capacity of 1TB; with new AAA games requiring more and more storage space, you may want to consider a 2TB or 4TB SSD. The Lexar SL660 Blaze Gaming Portable SSD is available in 512GB, and 1TB capacities for $119.99 and $189.99, respectively. The disadvantage is that it requires a PC with USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 compatibility for maximum performance.

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