Lexar says its new Muse is the world’s thinnest portable SSD. At its thickest the metal drive measures about 3.8 mm, and it tapers to just 1 mm at the edge.
The company showed the Muse at IFA 2026 in Berlin, where it is also marking its 30th anniversary. Lexar was founded in California in 1996.
A drive built for phone shooters
The target is people who film on smartphones. A magnetic sleeve holds the drive to the back of a compatible MagSafe iPhone, and a supplied SnapLink cable snaps onto it through spring-loaded pins, so there is no fiddling with a plug. The body is a single piece of machined metal, and inside sit a custom ultra-thin circuit board and stacked high-density NAND.
Lexar quotes read speeds up to 1,050 MB/s and writes up to 1,000 MB/s. The Muse works with iPhone, iPad, Mac and other USB-C devices. On compatible iPhones it can record Apple ProRes 4K video directly to the drive at up to 120 fps. Lexar’s footnote adds that iPhone use needs a USB-C model from the iPhone 15 series or later, and that MagSafe fit and ProRes support vary by phone and case.
Capacities of 512GB and 1TB arrive in the fourth quarter of 2026, with regional availability, pricing and compatibility varying by market.
Storage for local AI
Lexar also showed concept hardware for compact AI devices: a Gen5 SSD and a Gen5 storage stick with bandwidth up to 11 GB/s. Both rest on a Gen5 controller developed by Longsys, built on a 5 nm process without DRAM. Lexar’s Luma Bridge software uses workload scheduling, predictive prefetch and cache management to speed up large Mixture-of-Experts models, and the company claims it cuts DRAM needs by roughly 40%.
PCs and electric vehicles
For system builders and business buyers, Lexar brought a client SSD range with PCIe Gen3 and Gen4 options. It also pitched a dashcam USB flash drive series for electric vehicles, whose cameras and Sentry Mode-style features record continuously. The drives use high-endurance firmware and a low-profile body, and are built to run across wide temperature ranges.
The show ran September 4 to 8 at Messe Berlin. Lexar’s stand was in Hall 20, in the Content Creation area near the North entrance.
