Lexar JumpDrive Tough 64GB USB 3.1 Flash Drive Review

TweakTown's Rating: 88%

The Bottom Line

Lexar gets aggressive offering up an extremely durable drive for bargain pricing.

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Lexar has been building out its JumpDrive lineup for years. It's likely one of the most popular lineups of drives next to the Extreme from SanDisk. With that said, I have had the opportunity to test here on TweakTown, nearly all JumpDrive solutions for the last five years and today we add the JumpDrive Tough.

The JumpDrive Tough is Lexar's entry into the tough, durable drive market. This solution houses a durable ABS plastic enclosure with rubber over mold that is capable of withstanding pressures up to 750psi, temperatures down to -13F, and is waterproof down to 100'.

Adding to this via software this solution supports AES 256-bit encryption while on the performance side we get 150 MB/s read and 60 MB/s write. Capacity options include 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB and it can be had for $15.99, $24.99, and $44.99, respectively, all with a three-year warranty.

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The JumpDrive tough comes in the standard cardboard hanger. Capacity is listed at the top right with features listed along the bottom.

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Moving on to the drive, with this being a capped design Lexar had to lower its tolerances making the cap fit very tight. It has a gray rubber over mold, which against the teal gives it a pleasing aesthetic. Capacity for the drive is printed on the cap.

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Seen above, we have the USB port blue in color to denote 3.0.

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Overall, the added protection of the drive doesn't make it much bigger than a standard drive.

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Taking a look at the drive properties, Lexar has this drive formatted with FAT32. This limits file size but does give it a wider range of compatibility out of the box. Useable capacity is 59.6GB.

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Diving into the performance, I wasn't quite able to reach the 150 MB/s marketing spec but did come close at 133 MB/s Q32 and 142 MB/s read QD1. As far as write performance goes, I was able to crush the 60 MB/s read mark set by the marketing.

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Looking at file sizes, the JD Tough holds its 105 MB/s from 16M to 2M. Write performance stays a bit longer holding 85 MB/s from 16M to 256K.

Lexar has been making flash drive since the beginnings of USB technology. The JumpDrive lineup has been around since the begging and with the introduction of USB 3.x, this lineup has really come into its own. Transitioning forward Lexar has created several high-performance flash drives but up until now hasn't had a true durable drive. The Tough fills that void with shock and waterproof protection and solid capacity options up to 128GB.

On the side of performance, I wasn't quite able to hit that magic 150 MB/s set from marketing but I was able to beat the 60 MB/s write mark by a good margin reaching 83 MB/s. FBM showed both read and write this drive was able to hold its performance at higher file sizes while smaller random operations 512 to 32K were all over the place.

In closing, I enjoyed the Lexar JumpDrive Tough. It's a drive I will surely keep in my arsenal for many years to come. Adding to this these drives are very aggressively priced with the 64GB solution tested here today costing just $24.99 MSRP.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Maximus IX Hero (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K (buy from Amazon) / (Read our Review)
• Memory: G.SKILL TridentZ DDR4 3200 (buy from Amazon)
• Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Hybrid (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Intel 730 480GB SSD (buy from Amazon) / (Read our Review)
• Secondary Storage: MyDigitalSSD BP5 512GB SSD (buy from Amazon)
• Case: EVGA DG-86 (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 750 P2 (buy from Amazon)
• Networking: ASUS PCE-AC88 AC3100 (buy from Amazon)
• Networking: ASUS ROG 10G Express
• Networking: ASUS Thunderbolt EX3 (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)