Last week, Lexar announced the release of its latest JumpDrive thumb drive, the JumpDrive Tough. The new JumpDrive Tough is a USB 3.1 thumb drive with stated transfer speeds of 150MB/s read and 60MB/s write and a maximum capacity of 128GB. To top it off, it is also built to be rugged enough to take a few bumps along the way, without the price increase typcially seen in rugged devices.





Last week, Lexar announced the release of its latest JumpDrive thumb drive, the JumpDrive Tough. The new JumpDrive Tough is a USB 3.1 thumb drive with stated transfer speeds of 150MB/s read and 60MB/s write and a maximum capacity of 128GB. To top it off, it is also built to be rugged enough to take a few bumps along the way, without the price increase typcially seen in rugged devices.

To live up to its Tough name, the new thumb drive is pressure resistant up to 750 PSI, able to withstand temperature between -13°F to 300°F, and is water resistant up to 98 feet. This is good news to professionals that do a lot of fieldwork or enthusiasts that take the adventurous route. If data is being collected and needs to be stored, users needn’t worry about the JumpDrive Tough having a spill, getting wet, or getting hot and not working. That takes care of external security; on the inside the thumb drive uses Lexar’s EncryptStick Lite software with 256-bit AES encryption. Data can automatically be encrypted through a password-protected vault. The JumpDrive Tough aims to protect data inside and out.

The Lexar JumpDrive Tough comes with a 3-year warranty and is price at $20 for the 32GB, $27 for the 64GB, and $45 for the 128GB.

Lexar JumpDrive Tough specifications:

Capacity: 32GB, 64GB, 128GB

Interface: USB 3.1 (backward compatible with USB 3.0 and 2.0)

Compatible with PC and Mac

Security: 256-bit AES encryption

Warranty: 3-year limited

Designed and Build

The Lexar JumpDrive Tough is a little bulkier than the standard thumb drive of similar capacity, but is still lightweight. The protective outer case is a stylish dark gray with light blue highlights. The over all outer case is study with a little bit of give when one squeezes it.

The thumb dive has a loop on one side where a user can slip it onto a key chain or a carabiner. The other end has a removable cap with the USB interface underneath.

Performance

For performance we ran IOMeter on our HP Z640 workstation. For this review we will be comparing the JumpDrive Tough to the following thumb drives:

First we’ll look at 2MB sequential speeds. Here the Tough hit 73.49MB/s write and 146.5MB/s read. This beat out the the Samsung Bar having 43.75MB/s write and 47.61MB/s read, and the TransMemory with 8.3MB/s write and 31.7MB/s read. Unsurprisingly, the two Pro thumb drives beat the Tough with the P20 having 121.12MB/s write and 270.91MB/s read and the SanDisk Extreme having 211MB/s writ and 229MB/s read.

Switching to 2MB random speeds, we see a big dip in performance as far as write goes with the Tough dropping down to 4.37MB/s write and 116.08MB/s read. The Tough had a better write score than the TransMemory (1.45MB/s) but slower than the Samsung Bar (15.93MB/s), P20 (2.34MB/s) and the SanDisk Extreme (66.4MB/s). On reads the Tough beat both the Samsung and Toshiba drives (with the TransMemory having a read score of 31.6MB/s and the Samsung Bar with 32.94MB/s), but again trailing the pro drives (the P20 having 215.44MB/s read and the SanDick Extreme having 229MB/s read).

Our final benchmark is 4k random performance in IOPS. Again the write performance dropped off with the Tough at 1.02 IOPS (below the Bar’s 22.07 IOPS, the TransMemory’s 1.7 IOPS, and the P20’s 1.15 IOPS). Read performance was 909.65 IOPS lower than the TransMemory’s 1,410.9 IOPS, the Bar’s 965.23 IOPS, and the P20’s 1,860 IOPS.

Conclusion

Keeping data safe moves beyond encryption when the data becomes portable. Luckily, Lexar has both internal and external security in mind when they designed the JumpDrive Tough. The JumpDrive Tough is a USB 3.1 thumb drive that can take a beating without compromising the data. The drive also employs Lexar’s EncryptStick Lite software with 256-bit AES encryption to keep data safe internally. The drive works with either Mac or PC, comes with a 3-year warranty, and is reasonably priced for a rugged thumb drive.

Looking at performance, we didn’t have other rugged thumb drives to compare it to, so we opted to similar form factor thumb drives with the Samsung Bar, the Toshiba TransMemory, the Lexar P20, and the SanDisk Extreme Pro. In sequential transfers the JumpDrive Tough was able to beat out the non-pro drives with 146.5MB/s read and 73.49MB/s write. Large block transfer speeds were still strong at 116.08MB/s read and 4.37MB/s write but fell behind the Samsung Bar on write performance as well as the P20 and Sandisk’s Extreme Pro. 4k random performance was the JumpDrive Tough’s weak spot with performance scores of 909.65 IOPS read and 1.02 IOPS write

Pros

Internal and external data protection

Up to 128GB of capacity

Strong 2MB sequential and random scores

Cons

Lower 4k random performance than comparable drives

The Bottom Line

The Lexar JumpDrive Tough is the go to thumb drive for those that need to collect and transfer data in rough conditions.

Lexar JumpDrive Tough on Amazon

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