Lexar TouchLock Portable SSD review

Being able to encrypt and protect your data can be important, even if it’s to stop your little brother from accessing your Steam library, and at CES this year Lexar revealed its Touchlock SSD, which melds 128-bit AES hardware encryption and a capacity of 512 GB or 1 TB (and a 2 TB version has been announced) with an NFC reader, so you can use your phone to unlock it. It also has one of those clever MagSafe rings on it, so you can stick it to the back of your phone, but it will work with almost anything with a USB port, be that a Windows or Linux PC, a Mac, or either kind of smartphone.

It’s not the fastest drive out there, as Lexar has chosen to fit it with a USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface—that’s the 5 Gbps one—which is an odd decision given that phones like the Pixel 10 Pro and recent iPhones come with Gen 2 ports that are twice as fast, and our PCs bristle with USB4 and Thunderbolt sockets. But it’s still a decent speed, and if you’re using it as a way to expand the storage in your Steam Deck you’re not going to notice the difference. It probably helps keep the price down too.

With a name like TouchLock, you might expect the drive to have a built-in fingerprint reader, but you’d be mistaken. The security here comes via your phone. It magnetically clamps itself to the back of your iPhone or Android model and talks to the Lexar mobile app via NFC. And if you’ve got it hooked up to your PC, you’ll need to unlock it in this way before Windows even knows it’s there.

Setup is straightforward. Get the Lexar app installed on your phone, then use the included USB cable to connect them together. Snap the drive onto the back of the phone, and the app will launch, and you’ll need to go through a brief pairing ceremony in which a recovery key is generated. This looks rather like the Winter Soldier’s activation phrase, and you'll have to repeat it back to the app once you’ve saved it somewhere safe—this involves tapping words in the right order on the phone screen rather than typing them in, and doesn’t take long. That done, you can unlock the drive at any time by pressing it against your phone, no matter what the USB port is connected to.

The included cable is an odd one. It’s clearly marked 10 Gbps despite this being a 5 Gbps drive, and comes with a USB-C to A adapter that will only go on one way thanks to a small plastic clip. The drive seemed quite happy being connected to a PC via a USB4 cable, though it did nothing to improve its performance.

Speaking of which, it doesn’t do badly for a Gen 1 drive. Obviously it was never going to transfer data at the same speed as a USB4 drive, or even USB 3.2 Gen 2, but it’s surprising how small the gap can be. PCG uses Final Fantasy 14’s benchmark to test external drives, and while the Crucial X9 loads the Shadowbringers test in 16.5 seconds, the Lexar TouchLock does it in 15.2s. And it’s the same in Dawntrail, with the X9’s 14.29s loading time beaten by the TouchLock’s 12.75s.

The Lexar drive can’t beat the Crucial one everywhere—in sequential data transfer tests things are exactly as you’d expect, with the X9 running about twice as fast as the TouchLock, but it goes to show that in game loading, sequential speed isn’t what matters.

Lexar’s drive goes on to beat even the Samsung T9 (USB 3.2x2, 13.51s) in the Dawntrail loading race, which takes place at 1440p to simulate the way we play our games these days. There's less than two seconds between the contenders here, so we’re not talking about huge differences, but it’s interesting to see that the fastest drive on paper isn’t always the best when it comes to game loading.

On the outside, this is a nicely proportioned and extremely light SSD, perfectly proportioned to snap to the back of a phone and act as a backup drive for movies and photos, or perhaps to hold media for playback. It’s also handy for transferring those media files to a PC for editing, and while holding an extended Steam library may not be exactly what Lexar had in mind when it designed the TouchLock, it handles this task well too.

If security is important to you, the TouchLock may not be the absolute best for encryption, as Samsung’s T7 Shield offers 256-bit scrambling, but it does win in terms of convenience, as long as you have your phone with you every time you want to use it. Being a USB 3.2 Gen 1 device also means it can more easily hook up to a broader range of devices, including phones, tablets and older PCs as well as Macs and those that run Linux, without needing to worry about which flavour of Thunderbolt you’re trying to connect to.

It worked first time on every device I tried it on, once unlocked with my phone. It’s also reasonably priced, which in a world where the cost of anything made of silicon seems to be on an upward spiral, is an important thing to consider.