Lexar Muse: the world's thinnest portable SSD snaps onto your iPhone
Lexar has announced what it calls the world's thinnest portable SSD at IFA 2026. The Muse measures just 3.8mm at its thickest point, tapering to 1mm at the edges — roughly half the depth of the Samsung P7. It's designed to slip into a MagSafe wallet and ride on the back of an iPhone 15 or later, which puts it squarely in the hands of mobile video creators.
The look
The drive's dimensions are 80 × 48 × 3.8mm. The tapered edges make it look even slimmer in hand. Lexar's pitch is that the Muse effectively disappears behind your phone, held in place by a MagSafe-compatible sleeve rather than sitting loose in a bag.
The trade-off
That extreme thinness comes at a cost. A standard USB-C port simply doesn't fit inside a 3.8mm chassis, so Lexar swapped it out for a proprietary magnetic connector called SnapLink. The upside: you can transfer files without detaching the drive from your phone. The downside: if you leave that cable at home, no one else's USB-C cord will save you. That's a real friction point for anyone who works across multiple devices — and it puts Lexar on the wrong side of the EU's push toward universal USB-C charging standards.
Speed and capacity
Lexar quotes read speeds up to 1,050 MB/s and write speeds up to 1,000 MB/s, per PR Newswire. That's fast enough for offloading ProRes footage from an iPhone 15 Pro without waiting around. For context, Lexar's own SL600 hits roughly double those speeds — but it's also considerably bulkier.
What neither Lexar nor the tech press have gotten a clear answer on is sustained write performance. Pushing a terabyte of ProRes video through a 3.8mm aluminum shell raises genuine questions about thermal throttling under load, a concern flagged by Blogspan. Lexar has not published throttling specs.
Availability
The Muse launches in Q4 2026 in 512GB and 1TB. Pricing is unconfirmed, but given the form factor and iPhone-first design, expect a noticeable premium over standard portable SSDs. If you're an iPhone 15+ user shooting a lot of video on the go, the convenience angle is real — just make sure you never lose that SnapLink cable.
