GoKawiilLexar recently invited Tom’s Hardware, along with several other journalists, to visit its Shenzhen office, which sits north of Hong Kong, as well as its research and development facilities at Zhongshan across the bay. From there, the company took us to their Suzhou factory, about an hour and a half to the west of Shanghai, to explore their automotive storage production line.
The company is primarily known for its flash memory products, particularly for high-performance microSD, SD, and CFexpress cards for cameras and other portable devices, as well as flash drives and card readers. However, the company has recently been making a push towards modern SSDs and RAM modules, and it’s also working on the next generation of AI-ready storage solutions.
We'll start with our factory tour on this page, and then move to the Q and A session with Lexar executives and the history of the company on the second page.
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Moving beyond memory cards and flash drives
Lexar has continued producing removable storage solutions after its 2017 acquisition by Longsys. Just one year after the purchase, the brand was the first to commercially release a 1TB SD card. The company also claimed that it had the world’s fastest CFexpress Type B cards in 2022, which is crucial for both photographers shooting in burst mode and videographers shooting at high-resolution 4K video. Just last year, the company also released the world’s first stainless steel SD cards, featuring an IP68 environmental protection rating while also providing much more strength than regular plastic SD card models.
But now that Lexar was under the wing of Longsys, the company had access to formidable resources for research and development, as well as the nearly two decades of experience that its parent firm had in working with flash storage. Although the company had already been making USB flash drives before 2017, it was only after the Longsys purchase that the company started making and selling proper drives.
One of the first Lexar SSDs we’ve seen is the NM600 M.2 NVMe SSD, which, although it did not offer mind-bending performance, was an affordable and efficient SSD that offered a great solution for those looking for relatively affordable storage. Since then, Lexar has released several NVMe SSDs, like the NM790, which offered excellent sustained read and write speeds while staying power efficient and is priced competitively, especially at the 4TB capacity, as well as the 1TB Lexar Play M.2 2230 SSD, which is one of the best solutions for expanding storage on gaming handheld devices.
Image 1 of 2 (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
The company has also started building its own storage controllers, which manage how data is stored, moved, corrected, and retrieved from the NAND flash chips used by memory cards. This would allow Lexar to have more in-depth control of how its memory products would perform and differentiate its offerings from the competition. At the moment, Lexar’s Silver Plus microSD, Blue microSD, Silver Plus SD, and Silver SD cards already use in-house controllers.
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