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Lexar announces ‘world’s thinnest portable SSD’ in celebration of the brand’s 30th anniversary – Lexar Muse drive achieves 0.15-inch thickness with proprietary pogo-pin cable, magnetic sleeve for phone mounting
If you’ve ever snapped a 10,000 mAh magnetic battery or other bulky accessory to the back of your compatible Android or iPhone, you know how cumbersome it can be, especially while you’re trying to use your phone rather than just letting it charge. For those who are shooting video or backing up their files on the go, Lexar wants to make that problem go away with its latest external SSD, the Muse.
(Image credit: Future)
At just 80×48×3.8 mm (3.15x1.89x0.15 inches), with tapered edges that make it feel even slimmer, the company calls it the world’s thinnest portable SSD. And compared to the best external SSDs we’ve tested, it certainly stands out for its tiny size.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
But to get that slim and small, the company is using a proprietary snap-on cable (Lexar calls it SnapLink) that connects to the back of the drive magnetically, via pogo pins. And the pogo pin side looks kind of bulky compared to the drive itself. If you want the drive to magnetically attach to your phone, you’ll need to slide the drive into its sleeve first, which also looks like it could do double duty as a card wallet.
In other words, Lexar made serious functional design sacrifices to achieve its slim storage superlative. Still, there’s no denying that the Muse will take up a lot less space on the back of your phone than alternatives like Orico’s BookDrive P10Plus.
Aside from its unique slimness and requisite accessories, the Muse looks to be a fairly typical 10 Gbps drive, with Lexar promising read speeds up to 1,050 MB/s, and write speeds up to 1,000 MB/s. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of sustained write performance is possible in such a thin shell.
As a USB-C storage device, the drive will of course also work with Macs, Android devices, and PCs (although you may need to format the drive first to support other operating systems). Lexar also notes there is app support for automatically backing up footage from iPhones, specifically.
Lexar says the Muse portable SSD will be available in 512 and 1TB capacities, sometime in the last quarter of 2026. Official pricing is up in the air, but representatives at IFA told us the company was aiming for roughly $230 for the 512GB model and $380 for 1TB. As always, devices that claim things like “world’s thinnest” tend to carry a price premium.
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After a rough start with the Mattel Aquarius as a child, Matt built his first PC in the late 1990s and ventured into mild PC modding in the early 2000s. He’s spent the last 15 years covering emerging technology for Smithsonian, Popular Science, and Consumer Reports, while testing components and PCs for Computer Shopper, PCMag and Digital Trends.
