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Lexar, a leading company in the development and manufacture of award-winning memory solutions, has recently added two new offerings to it JumpDrive range of flash drive products.  Both of these products support the latest USB 3.0 technology.  These recent additions are the S23, which is claimed to be one of the smallest USB 3.0 flash drives currently available, and the P10 which comes with the tag line of being one of the fastest USB 3.0 flash drives available for purchase.

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The S23 flash drive is a retractable device with dimensions of 46 x 22 x 8mm (H x W x D) when in its closed state.  When the contact strip element is slid out from the body of the unit then the height of the product increases to 58mm.  Sometimes, as a result of the retractable nature of this device, it can prove a little tricky to insert this flash stick into a USB connection.  If the targeted port is not conveniently positions then you could find that the contact element will slide back into the body of the Lexar device rather than enter the designated slot.  This happened to me on more than one occasion until I learned to keep my thumb behind the slider button. 

With its weight of 6g, and size, it is not difficult to misplace the drive.  It could easily be lost among the normal items that tend to reside in my pocket or among the clutter that generally builds up on my workspace.  Fortunately Lexar has foreseen this situation.  Included in the package is a key ring attachment to help keep the unit secure when not being plugged into a USB port.  A certain amount of skill, a bit like threading a small eye-hole in a needle will be required in order to carry out this attachment task.

Four different two-tone colour schemes of this flash drive are available with the actual colour scheme being linked to the capacity of the drive.  The lowest capacity is 8GB and this drive is decked out in white and orange.  The teal and white colour scheme indicates that the drive’s capacity is doubled to 16GB.  A further doubling of the drive’s capacity to 32GB brings about a change of colour scheme to green and white.  This is the unit that I used in my review testing.  Finally the 64GB version of the drive comes in purple and white. 

The combination of the various colour schemes and the plastic casing of the drive do not inspire too much confidence, making the S23 seem more look a throw-away device but, as I shall cover a little latter, the JumpDrive’s performance belies this.  According to Lexar, this USB 3.0 JumpDrive should be capable of operating at X4 the speed of a USB 2.0 JumpDrive.  Unfortunately I do not have a USB 2.0 version of this drive available so I am unable to confirm this figure but nevertheless I was satisfied with the performance of the S23.

Lexar has rated the 32GB version of the JumpDrive S23 (remember this is my review sample) at having a Read speed of up to 100MB/s and a Write speed of 55MB/s.  I decided to put this claim to the test by running a series of Read and Write tasks using different types of files.  In each case the files being used were transferred between the USB 3.0 JumpDrive and an internal hard drive using the basic copy and paste procedure.  The results can be seen in the table below.

These figures compared favourably to those issued by Lexar and are impressive with Read capability outperforming the Write aspect of this small, useful storage device.  I was satisfied with the results I achieved and will find this device extremely useful and look forward to testing the Lexar P10 device when samples become available.

http://www.lexar.com/products/lexar-jumpdrive-s73-usb-30-flash-drive