Over the past few years, the storage industry has relied heavily on a few established standards, including the 2.5-inch drive and the M.2 2280 form factor. Although these formats have housed our data on desktops, laptops, and other devices over the years, their physical dimensions have remained largely unchanged, even as other components have shrunk. Lexar is now looking to break that mold, aiming to introduce its customers to a new era of compact storage with its mSSD (micro Solid State Drive) standard.
The company, which recently launched the Play Although this product still has no release date in the United States, it has just arrived in Europe as Lexar tests a compact M.2 2230 form factor, the smallest on the market.
While the company offers its new Play “We want to achieve a standard and we have discussed with our partners the expansion of this technology. As we celebrate our 30th anniversary, this is our commitment to innovation,” a Lexar spokesperson told us.
Lexar Play X marks the start of a new SSD era
José Adorno/BGR
According to Lexar, its new Play X mSSD is the ideal device for gamers and content creators. However, the company wants to extend the new standard to more devices than just PCs. He believes this PCIe 4.0 2230 SSD could be a great fit for AI applications, such as next-generation smart glasses, robots, and small wearable devices. More than that, the company believes that this new technology can bring a huge improvement to laptops. Since manufacturers are always trying to reduce the size of internal components, this upgrade to SSD could give them more space to add more memory, a bigger battery, and more.
Lexar says its first mSSD product is also much more durable and has built-in data protection compared to other major SSDs. Its unified architecture and integrated design provide greater resistance to dust, humidity and physical shock, ensuring the security of user data. According to the company, the mSSD unifies the controller, NAND and PMIC in a single module, bringing more stability, system integration and the possibility of scaling this product for enterprise use, as it could be deployed in enterprises to help build servers, AI platforms and other complex scenarios, thanks to its custom controller and firmware design.
Lexar celebrates its 30th anniversary by introducing a new storage platform
José Adorno/BGR
To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Lexar invited us and other American media to share a little more about its story. Founded in 1996 in San Jose, California, it was part of Micro’s business from 2006 to 2017 and is now owned by Longsys, a flash memory company based in Shenzhen, China. Over the course of a few days, the company took us through its manufacturing process in Suzhou and Shenzhen, its quality control lab, how it tests its products using hundreds of different devices to ensure compatibility, and how it stands out from the competition by controlling the entire storage card manufacturing process.
Its latest products include Lexar’s Express microSD card for the Nintendo Switch 2, which provides a reliable experience when starting games; portable SSDs, which can be used with smartphones or for backups on the go; and DDR5 RAM.
For the new Play For now, Lexar says it has shipped this new standard to a few laptop partners, so we can see the fruits of these collaborations soon.
