The Lexar Professional Go Portable SSD with Hub (starts at $299.99 for 1TB; $349.99 for 2TB as tested) is a singular, modular storage accessory for your phone. It combines a minuscule external SSD, a tiny USB-C hub, and several unique connectors. It is primarily for videographers with a recent iPhone with a USB-C port shooting in Apple’s ProRes formats. ProRes 4K videos, especially at 60 or 120fps, can consume a huge amount of drive space, and you can bypass your phone’s storage and save such videos directly to the attached SSD as you shoot. Although ideally suited to the mobile videography niche, the Go is a quite capable ultra-small external drive, which can be bought separately from the hub and connectors. However, you pay a premium for it over comparable external SSDs like the Editors’ Choice-winning Crucial X9 Pro.
Design: An SSD/USB-C Hub Combo for iPhones
I am fond of noting in reviews how tiny many recent external SSDs have become, but the Lexar Go sets a new standard in miniaturization. It measures a mere 0.3 by 1 by 1.7 inches (HWD) and is featherweight at 0.5 ounce. The silver-hued drive, rounded at the corners, is clad in a textured gray rubber bumper.
Near the end of one of the (relatively) long sides is a male USB-C plug instead of the usual port. Thus, the Go can plug directly into a USB-C port on a computer, phone, or tablet, or the included hub; it fit snugly into all three types of devices I paired it with. (Note, though, that you may have to remove your phone’s or tablet’s case to get it to connect properly, depending on how thick the case is, particularly if you use one of the included connectors.) The drive’s interface is USB 3.2 Gen 2, which supports a maximum throughput of 10Gbps.
The hub, a square, silvery device with rounded corners, measures 0.3 by 1.8 by 1.8 inches (HWD), unusually small for a port hub. It packs in no less than four USB-C ports. You could connect one to the drive, another to your phone, a third to a power bank or adapter (the hub supports up to 30 watts of USB power delivery), and the fourth to an external microphone, for example. You don’t even need a phone to use the hub, which Lexar also sells separately for $49.99.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Other accessories included in the version we reviewed are a cold-shoe mount (for connecting to a bracket on a phone’s filming rig), a strap, and two 180-degree USB-C-to-USB-C connectors (one female-to-male and one male-to-male).
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Although you can plug the Go directly into the iPhone’s USB-C port, where it extends down from the bottom of the phone, with the former connector you can, in effect, tuck the Go behind the phone so it rests against its back.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The primary problem that the Go addresses is how to shoot and record 4K video in Apple’s ProRes format. Models going back to the iPhone 13 support filming in ProRes, but you could not record directly to an external drive without a Lightning adapter until the company included a USB-C port with the iPhone 15.
Particularly with 4K ProRes video at 60fps (starting with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max) and 120fps (with the iPhone 16 Pro models), recording quickly takes up a huge amount of disk space. According to Apple, recording a minute of 4K ProRes video, even at 30fps, consumes 6GB, with higher frame rates using even more space. The internal storage can, therefore, fill quickly, especially if you don’t have a full terabyte of storage on your iPhone. It’s more convenient to record that video straight to an external drive such as the Lexar Professional Go, and it can spare you the recurring cost of an iCloud+ subscription and the need to upgrade your plan as your storage needs rise.
You can record Apple ProRes video to many recent external SSDs, but the Lexar Professional Go Portable SSD With Hub is tailor-made for this task. Video pros may want to attach the drive and hub to a filming rig—a frame, usually with two handles, that supports and lets you precisely move the phone and to which accessories such as a microphone can be affixed using the cold-shoe cable. You can record ProRes video directly to the Go using either using the iPhone’s native camera app or a third-party app such as Blackmagic Camera.
You can also use the Go with an Android device, provided it has a USB-C port. It can’t record in ProRes, but you can use an app like MotionCam Pro to record 4K video at 60fps and convert it to ProRes.
You wouldn’t expect as lightweight an SSD as the Go to sustain damage if dropped—particularly with its rubber bumper—and indeed, in Lexar’s testing, it withstood one-meter falls. It has an ingress protection rating of IP65; as it is completely sealed, with no ports, it is impervious to dust, dirt, and sand and can survive being squirted with jets of water, though not prolonged immersion.
Lexar offers the company’s DataShield software, which lets you enable AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption for the drive by setting a password for it. The gold standard in security, AES is essentially uncrackable.
Lexar backs the Go with a five-year warranty, which is typical of external SSDs from major brands.
Testing the Lexar Professional Go: Robust Performance for a Tiny SSD
Don’t be fooled by the Lexar Professional Go’s diminutive frame; it has all the performance you’d expect from any USB 3.2 Gen 2 external SSD. There is enough consistency among the scores of Gen 2 drives that it is hard to go too wrong with one.
We test most external SSDs using PC Labs’ Windows external-storage testbed, a desktop built on an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard with an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition CPU, housed in a SilverStone case. The system has 48GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz, and an Nvidia GeForce graphics card. We use the motherboard’s 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 port for testing compatible drives such as the Lexar Go; for Gen 2×2 drives, we test using a 2×2 port added via an Orico PCIe expansion card.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
We put the Lexar Go through our usual suite of external solid-state drive benchmarks, including Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, 3DMark Storage, the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, and our own folder transfer test. The first three are run on the PC with the drive formatted in NTFS, and the latter two on an Apple MacBook Pro using exFAT.
Crystal DiskMark’s sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. The PCMark 10 Storage test measures an SSD’s readiness for various everyday tasks. The 3DMark Storage benchmark aggregates a drive’s performance on various gaming-related tasks.
We compared the Go with a group of USB 3.2 Gen 2 external SSDs, all of them portable drives powered over their USB connection. The exception is the SanDisk Desk Drive, which is a tabletop SSD that requires its own power source.
The Go’s Crystal DiskMark sequential speeds fell within the same tight range as our comparison Gen 2 drives, all scoring a bit below their read and write ratings of around 1,000MBps. On the PCMark 10 general storage test, the Go’s score was near the bottom of our comparison group, but still well within the expected range. In the gaming-centric 3DMark Storage benchmark, the Go’s score was in the middle of the pack.
In our Mac-based testing, in the Blackmagic Disk Speed benchmark, the Go’s results were a bit uneven, with it posting the lowest score in write throughput among our comparison drives while tying for the highest score in read throughput with the Kingston XS1000. Still, the differences between high and low scores on this test are relatively minor. The Go’s score in our folder transfer test was middling.
Verdict: An iPhone Videographer’s Essential Companion
The Lexar Professional Go With Hub is a unique modular device that greatly simplifies the task of recording and storing drive-space-hogging Apple ProRes 4K video on your iPhone and lets you connect and power other videography peripherals like microphones. Even if it weren’t the only such SSD/hub combo around, the Go is easy to recommend in this capacity due to its clever, compact, and versatile design.
Even if you have no interest in mobile-phone videography, the Go as a standalone drive has merit as a wildly small external SSD, though you do pay a premium for it over standard Gen 2 drives. For instance, the Editors’ Choice-winning Crucial X9 Pro comes in at a considerably lower price at the same capacity and comes in a 4TB model as well. But you can’t connect the X9 Pro directly to a phone, and the Lexar Professional Go is less than half its size.
We don’t often bestow our Editors’ Choice award on a product with no real competitors. Still, the Lexar Professional Go With Hub provides an effective solution for iPhone videographers who want to record 4K ProRes video with high frame rates without swamping precious device memory, and is deserving of our highest recommendation.
Lexar Professional Go Portable SSD With Hub
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The Bottom Line
The one-of-a-kind Lexar Professional Go Portable SSD provides an effective solution for storing iPhone ProRes 4K video without clogging up your phone’s limited memory.
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About Tony Hoffman
Senior Analyst, Hardware
