exar has unveiled the Muse, staking a claim to the thinnest portable SSD on the market. The drive measures 80 x 48 x 3.8 millimeters, shaving its tapered edges down to just 1 millimeter while maxing out at 3.8 millimeters at its center. Achieving dimensions closer to a credit card than a storage drive meant ditching standard hardware layouts: Lexar built a custom ultra-thin printed circuit board packed into a seamless, single-piece metal unibody enclosure.
The Dongle Trap
Squeezing hardware below four millimeters forced a brutal engineering compromise: eliminating the universal USB-C port entirely. A standard female Type-C jack simply cannot fit into an enclosure this narrow. Instead, Lexar substituted a magnetic Pogo-pin interface.
The Muse Ultra-Slim Portable SSD’s minimalist aesthetic begins with a precision-machined unibody metal enclosure formed from a single piece of metal, minimizing seams, joins, and visual interruptions.
Connecting the drive requires snapping on Lexar's proprietary SnapLink Magnetic cable, which terminates in a standard USB-C connector on the other end. Forget that custom lead on a trip, and your sleek external storage turns into an expensive, unreadable metal slab, completely detached from the universal cable standard in your bag.
Speed, Video Workflow, and Market Timing
On paper, the connection delivers decent throughput. Lexar claims the SnapLink interface hits sequential transfer rates of up to 1,050 MB/s read and 1,000 MB/s write. That bandwidth clears the bar for direct Apple ProRes 4K 120p external video capture on recent iPhone Pro flagships. However, sustained workloads in a sealed, razor-thin chassis raise obvious thermal throttling questions, as tiny metal shells have very little surface area to dump sustained heat without throttling write speeds.
Lexar plans to release the Muse in 512GB and 1TB capacities starting in Q4 2026, though pricing remains undisclosed. Before buying into card-thin aesthetics, mobile shooters should ask whether shaving millimeters off an SSD is worth carrying yet another proprietary dongle that cannot be replaced at a corner store.