{"id":788600,"date":"2025-12-03T01:24:44","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T01:24:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/Q8BrzXGwcrp9ifmCWfpx68"},"modified":"2025-12-03T01:24:44","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T01:24:44","slug":"lexar-play-2230-1tb-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/lexar-play-2230-1tb-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Lexar Play 2230 1TB review"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Lexar Play is a fantastic little drive for anyone looking to augment their Steam Deck, ROG Ally, or Legion Go. I've been thoroughly impressed with the performance this drives offers in such a small form factor, which is suited to the cramped NVMe slot in the best handheld gaming PCs<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Available only in a 1TB capacity, the Lexar Play is best suited to life in a handheld machine and not for housing an enormous library on desktop. You'd be better off with the Lexar NM790 4TB<\/a> for that sorta job, another drive I really rate from the same manufacturer. The smaller stature of the Play means it's not quite as quick as some larger size 1TB drivers around a similar price point of $85<\/a>. Though the Lexar Play 2230 delivers impressive speeds versus other stubby storage drives.<\/p>\n

We've previously reviewed two other drives intended for use in a handheld machine: the Sabrent Rocket 2230<\/a> and the Sabrent Rocket Q4 2230<\/a>. The Lexar Play is faster (and cheaper) than both. That's in terms of rated speed from the manufacturer and the actual speeds I measured in benchmarking. It's worth noting what slot your device has before pulling the trigger on a 2230 drive like this, however. The Steam Deck and ROG Ally both use that size slot, but the Legion Go requires an adapter to fit a 2230 drive, and others from Ayaneo and OneXPlayer use standard 2280 size SSDs.<\/p>\n

The Lexar Play 2230 hit almost exactly the speed claimed by the manufacturer at 5251 MB\/s seq. read and 4722 MB\/s seq. Write in CrystalDiskMark. For the record, it's rated to 5200 MB\/s read and 4700 MB\/s. When it comes to random 4K speeds, the Play 2230 is supremely quick at 91 MB\/s read and 315 MB\/s write.<\/p>\n

\n
Play 2230 specs<\/div>\n
\n

Capacity:<\/strong> 1TB
\nInterface:<\/strong> PCIe Gen4 (NVMe)
\nSize:<\/strong> 2230
\nNAND: <\/strong>Micron B47R 176-layer TLC
\nController:<\/strong> Silicon Motion SM2269XT
\nDRAM:<\/strong> None
\nSeq read (rated):<\/strong> 5200 MB\/s
\nSeq write (rated): <\/strong>4700 MB\/s
\nEndurance:<\/strong> 600 TBW
\nWarranty:<\/strong> five-year
\nPrice:<\/strong> $85<\/a> | \u00a385<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The Silicon Motion SM2269XT controller and Micron B47R 176-layer TLC NAND within this drive are working wonders for smaller read and write operations.<\/p>\n

That's just the best case scenario, however. To get an idea of the sort of sustained performance, I've run IOMeter for 15 minutes with a 1 MiB block size. This test spits out a very useful graph: it shows the initial burst of speed capable through SLC caching\u2014effectively running a portion of the TLC NAND as SLC NAND for a performance boost\u2014and the sustained speed once the SLC cache is maxed out.<\/p>\n