The Lexar Armor 700 Portable SSD (starts at $149.99; $419.99 for 4TB as tested) has many things you might want in an external solid-state drive. It's small, lightweight, and offers protection from dirt, water, and accidental drops. Its encryption makes it effectively unhackable (at least by brute force), and it comes in capacities up to 4TB. Its benchmark performance numbers are unremarkable but within normal parameters. Just be sure that the computer you're pairing it with supports the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 standard—or be willing to upgrade your desktop with an expansion card—to get this drive's maximum speed benefit. Otherwise, the ADATA SD810, our Editors' Choice winner for external SSDs, is a better option.

Design: Small, Secure, and Rugged

Dark blue with silver trim, the Armor 700 measures 0.5 by 2.1 by 3.4 inches and weighs just 3 ounces. It appears slightly bowed, with the short sides a bit taller. In the middle of one short side is a USB-C port that supports the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 spec for a maximum throughput of up to 20Gbps.

To avail yourself of this prodigious speed, you'll need either a computer with a compatible port (relatively few models, even recent ones, have one) or a Gen 2x2 desktop expansion card, which can be had for less than $50. Check out our USB-C explainer for more on the differences among the various flavors of the USB interface.

Furthermore, with USB4 starting to appear in PCs and a few external drives, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 may be superseded without ever coming into its own, although that hasn't stopped manufacturers from churning out 2x2 drives. (To be fair, USB4 has stringent hardware compatibility requirements, and the USB4 SSDs we've tested so far have not been without problems.) But if you have a desktop or laptop with a USB-C port that supports the Gen 2x2 standard, you can get the most out of the Armor 700.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The Armor 700 can be used with Windows PCs, Macs, Android devices, and the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max; with the last, you can record 4K video at up to 60fps in Apple's Pro Res format and save it directly to the Armor 700 while the drive is connected to your phone.

True to its name, the Armor 700 has good ruggedness cred, with an ingress protection rating of IP66. This signifies complete protection against sand, dirt, and dust and protection against powerful water jets but not immersion. (That is to say, it can survive a sandstorm, but don't drop it in your swimming pool.) It also offers protection from drops of up to 9.8 feet. The ADATA SD810 is drop- and dust-proof to the same degree as the Armor 700 but even more water-resistant, rated to survive immersion in 3 feet of water for up to half an hour.

The Armor 700 also protects your data, thanks to Lexar's DataShield software, which lets you enable AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption. With the software installed on your computer, you can set a password for the drive. AES encryption is essentially uncrackable, even when subjected to a brute-force attack.

Lexar backs the drive with a five-year warranty, which is typical of external SSDs from major brands.

Testing the Armor 700: A Bit Off the Pace

We test USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 external SSDs using PC Labs' Windows 10 storage testbed, a desktop PC built on an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard with an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition CPU and an Nvidia GeForce graphics card. We use the motherboard's native 10GBps USB 3.2 Gen 2 port for testing most drives; for 20GBps Gen 2x2 drives like the Lexar, we use a Gen 2x2 port added via an Orico PCIe expansion card.

We subjected the Armor 700 to our usual suite of external solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, the PCMark 10 data drive benchmark, the 3DMark Storage gaming test, Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test, and our own folder transfer test. As the drive comes preformatted in exFAT, which is compatible with both Macs and Windows machines, we ran the latter two tests first on an Apple MacBook Pro. Then, we reformatted the drive in NTFS to run Crystal DiskMark, PCMark 10, and 3DMark on our Windows testbed. (Here's a closer look at our testing regimen for SSDs.)

In Crystal DiskMark testing, the Armor 700 effectively matched the speeds of our comparison drives, all USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 SSDs. They all tallied sequential read scores in the 1,900MBps range and write scores in the 1,700MBps range. While the Armor 700 had the lowest read score (by about 3%) and a write score near the top of the pack, the important thing to recognize is that the maximum speeds of any of these Gen 2x2 SSDs are about double those of the more common USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives, which have rated read and write speeds of around 1,000MBps. 

How well the device performs in the real world is more important than its raw throughput speed, of course. The PCMark 10 Data Drive test runs through a host of trace-based activities to simulate typical daily activities for a secondary drive. The Armor 700 had the slowest score on this test, 26% behind the leader, the ADATA SD810, and 10% lower even than the next lowest score, which belonged to the Crucial X10 Pro.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

In the gaming-related 3DMark Storage test, the Armor 700 turned in another low score, with the other SSDs doing between 3% and 10% better. In our Mac testing, the Armor 700 had our second-best Blackmagic write throughput score, lagging only the LaCie Rugged Mini SSD, whose inexplicably high score was 43% better. Then, it turned in the lowest read throughput score,13% behind its nearest rival.

In short, the Armor 700's benchmark scores were mediocre, coming in last in several of our tests. Its scores were still within our expected range, but the other drives generally did better. Still, note that the results for all our Gen 2x2 SSDs were largely better than the recent Gen 2 drives we have tested.

Verdict: A Decent Gen 2x2 External SSD

The Lexar Armor 700 is a capable option as a premium external SSD, especially if you have a PC that supports USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 or are willing to invest in an expansion card to upgrade your desktop computer accordingly. It has good capacity options, top-notch AES security (which the ADATA SD810 lacks), and above-average ruggedization. The Armor 700's list pricing is a bit high, but it is frequently available for a substantial discount that puts it on (or near) a par with many other Gen 2x2 SSDs. Its benchmark scores are generally off the pace but not problematically low. Our top pick remains the ADATA SD810, but the Armor 700 is a worthy alternative, especially if you want the data security that its AES encryption offers.