Every memory maker I’ve followed in 2026 has been talking about one customer, and it wasn’t me. Nobody fills a server rack with pocket-sized drives, of course, though the flash inside them comes off the same wafers, and enterprise contracts decide how much of that output ever reaches a jacket pocket. At IFA 2026, Lexar made a case for keeping some of that flash in your pocket.
The company unveiled the Muse Ultra-Slim Portable SSD, which it calls the world’s thinnest portable SSD, and the pitch targets people filming on a phone. Muse is a card-shaped metal drive that slides into a magnetic sleeve, snaps onto the back of a MagSafe iPhone, and connects through a proprietary magnetic cable rather than a USB-C port. Lexar built it for handheld shooting, travel, and backup away from a desk.
Put a thick magnetic power bank on the back of a phone, and your grip changes straight away. A storage drive creates the same annoyance when you’re trying to film. Muse is clearly designed around that problem, but the fix comes with a catch: there’s no USB-C port. Lexar’s cable handles the connection, so misplacing it would be a pretty bad day.
Lexar quotes 80 by 48 by 3.8 mm for the body, and the 3.8 mm applies only to the thickest point in the middle. The enclosure tapers to 1 mm at the edge, which is the detail doing most of the work in the product photos. Machining the shell from a single piece of metal keeps seams out of the silhouette, and inside there’s a custom ultra-thin PCB with high-density NAND stacking to claw back space a normal drive wastes.
Lexar’s SL500 is 0.3 inches thick, which already feels pretty slim for a portable SSD. Muse goes further, cutting that almost in half while sticking with a metal body. Corsair’s EX400U measures 0.47 inches with its MagSafe ring built in. None of those numbers matter much on a desk. Hold a phone with a drive hanging off the back, though, and they start to matter. Muse is thin for a practical reason. After all, you have to hold the thing.
Muse drops the USB-C port and uses Lexar’s PogoPin interface instead. The included SnapLink cable stays in place with spring-loaded pins and N52-grade neodymium magnets. It’s a neat setup when everything is where it should be. Lose the cable, though, and the drive becomes a very nice-looking metal card you can’t connect to anything.
Lexar doesn’t give a pull-strength figure for the magnets. I’d like to see one. A magnetic connection feels fine on a desk, but I’d want more confidence in it before starting a long transfer with the drive hanging off my phone.
Xteink already went down a similar road with its X4 Pro e-reader, swapping the USB-C port for a magnetic pogo-pin connector and bundling an adapter to cover the gap. The trade was the same one Lexar makes now, and I don’t love how it multiplies the small parts you have to keep track of. One proprietary cable in a camera bag is one more item to forget at home.
Mounting brings a second compromise. Muse only attaches to a MagSafe iPhone once it’s inside the sleeve, so the slimmest drive of the show gets chunkier at the exact moment you’d want it thinnest. N52 magnets in the sleeve should at least keep the alignment honest.
There’s no USB4 here. Muse peaks at 1,050 MB/s for reads and 1,000 MB/s for writes, so Lexar is sticking with 10 Gbps USB speeds. Corsair’s EX400U can push past 3,200 MB/s over USB4. That makes a bigger difference when you’re moving a pile of footage than when you’re recording from a phone. For the latter, Muse’s speed looks quite reasonable.
Apple ProRes 4K video at up to 120 FPS can be recorded straight to the drive on compatible iPhone models, which is the whole reason a drive shaped like a credit card exists at all, because a minute of 10-bit HDR ProRes 4K at 30 fps swallows around 6 GB and a phone’s internal storage disappears fast at that rate. Lexar mentions app support for automatic iPhone backups as well, though it hasn’t detailed how that works. Any iPhone use needs a USB-C model from the 15 series or later, so owners of a Lightning phone can stop here.
The missing piece is sustained performance. Muse is 3.8 mm thick, and 20 minutes of ProRes capture could put a lot of heat into that small enclosure. Lexar quotes peak speeds but says nothing about how long the drive can maintain them under load. We’ll have to wait for real testing to find out. Muse launches in 512 GB and 1 TB capacities in the final quarter, with pricing still under wraps.
Behind Muse, Lexar’s Berlin showcase carries the part of storage that pays the bills right now. Its AI Storage Core display includes an AI-grade Gen5 SSD and a Gen5 storage stick, both quoted at up to 11 GB/s, built for compact AI hardware that has to hold local models and swap between them quickly. Underneath is Longsys’s own Gen5 controller SPU on a 5 nm process, running without onboard DRAM.
Luma Bridge is Lexar’s answer on the software side. The system uses workload scheduling and predictive prefetch to reduce how much DRAM an AI workload needs. Lexar puts the saving at 40%, although that number needs independent testing. The target is clear: Mixture-of-Experts models can push memory demands high as their KV caches grow. For local AI on cheaper machines, using storage to ease that pressure is a sensible approach.
There was some less interesting storage in the lineup, too. Lexar sells client SSDs to system builders and makes USB drives for dashcams that need to handle constant writes. EV owners running loop recording or sentry-style capture fit the target audience. It’s boring, sure, but boring storage can be big business.
Three decades have passed since Lexar started up in California in 1996, and a consumer-first flagship at that anniversary says plenty about how the company sees the current market. Counterpoint Research put enterprise SSDs at 48% of all NAND bits shipped in Q2 2026, close to double the 26% share a year earlier, and expects servers to take more than half of shipped bits by the end of the year. Every bit sold into a server is a bit that never becomes a retail drive, and consumer prices have climbed accordingly.
Micron shut down its 29-year-old consumer storage business earlier this year and shifted that supply toward data centers. That puts pressure on companies trying to make small, fast storage for phones and cameras. Lexar is betting there’s still enough demand for a drive like Muse. The bigger question is whether it can make enough of them at a price people will pay. Berlin didn’t give us an answer.