The Mystery of the Lexar SSD
It was a dark and stormy evening as I walked the aisles at our local Eden Prairie, MN Costco store. Imagine my delight at discovering a display selling a Lexar 512GB solid state drive (SSD) for only $124.99! Not only was this an unheard-of price for such a tiny little drive with a big capacity, the next-closest competitor last week was Samsung’s T3 500GB for close to $200 (available here at Amazon for $197.99).
When I got home I immediately tried it out and experienced the amazing write-speeds from my SSD iMac to this external SSD (44GBs transferred in just over 4 minutes). My wife took one look at it and said, “I want one!” so I went back the next day to buy one and they were all gone (and there were at least 50 available when I bought mine the night before).
“No worries,” I thought. Figuring I’d find them online I searched and searched and searched. The only place I could find them were on eBay from some miscellaneous seller with lukewarm reviews (at a higher price too) and I’m not about to do that.
This is the smallest, high capacity external SSD drive I’ve seen yet.
Unable to find any of these drives anywhere but eBay, I finally tweeted to @LexarMemory to see if they could solve the mystery of these apparently unavailable SSDs and point me in a direction where I could buy one:
@sborsch He Steve,
Currently we’ve only released a limited number onto the market. Please contact TS for more info.https://t.co/PqNUmD9uYX
-Lexar— Lexar (@LexarMemory) April 4, 2017
I connected with tech support and essentially received an “Um…I dunno” but a bit more information was revealed about these SSDs being available “in a limited number of stores.” With my experience working as a manufacturer’s rep in consumer electronics in the late 70s and 80s, it is highly likely that this SSD’s Costco appearance was a dry-run to see how this drive, at this price-point, would sell.
Based on how quickly these drives sold out this test was most certainly a success. That said, I’d strongly suggest that LexarMemory get a move-on rolling these drives out at retail since Western Digital just announced this tiny SSD drive (in three capacities: 256GB; 512GB; and 1TB) and they are a much more recognizable hard drive brand than Lexar.
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About Steve Borsch
Strategist. Learner. Idea Guy. Salesman. Connector of Dots. Friend. Husband & Dad. CEO. Janitor. More here.
Connecting the Dots Podcast
Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I'd seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never 'discovered' by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.
lexar is well known for usb memory sticks. I think they just rebrand generic parts but every Lexar device Ive had has worked as well as the big brands at a fraction of the cost.SSDs are memory acting as a hard drive so I would happily buy a ssd from a memory seller rather than a hard drive seller
“I would happily buy a ssd from a memory seller rather than a hard drive seller.”
I would too Alan and did, of course, but I know there are many people who would question “Who is Lexar?” and decide to buy a more well-known brand. That’s all. I think they’ll do really well with this drive though.
I bought two of these at Costco. I want more but they seem to not exist. Website lexar.com says that as of August 28, 2017 Longsys acquired the Lexar trademark. Hope Longsys brings back these sweet, cheap, SSDs.