Lexar NF100 revives the budget SATA SSD for older laptops and desktops
If your laptop or desktop is from the 2010s and its spinning hard drive is the bottleneck, Lexar has a straightforward fix. The company has launched the NF100, a 2.5-inch SATA III SSD series aimed squarely at budget-conscious upgrades. The 250GB model comes in at roughly $50 in China — competitive with, and potentially cheaper than, the Kingston A400 and Samsung 870 EVO at similar capacities in Western markets.
The drive
The NF100 ships in four capacities: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. All four fit the standard 2.5-inch, 7mm slot found in virtually every laptop and desktop built over the past decade. Sequential read speed tops out at 500MB/s — close to the SATA III ceiling of 560MB/s, so you're getting near the maximum the interface allows. Write endurance (TBW) scales with capacity: 42TB for the 120GB model, 84TB for the 250GB, 168TB for the 500GB, and 336TB for the 1TB. MTBF is rated at 1.5 million hours.
There's no moving parts, which means the NF100 is rated to handle shocks up to 1,500G — relevant if the drive is going into a laptop that gets tossed in a bag daily. Operating range runs from 0°C to 70°C. Lexar backs it with a two-year warranty in most Western markets.
The market reality
SATA SSDs still hold 46.6% market share in 2025, and the 2.5-inch form factor accounts for 39.8% of revenue — a reminder that plenty of hardware in homes and small offices still runs on this interface. NVMe drives are faster by an order of magnitude, but they require an M.2 slot that many older machines simply don't have. For those systems, a SATA SSD swap remains one of the cheapest, most effective upgrades available.
That said, the endurance ratings here — 42 to 336TBW depending on capacity — are three to ten times lower than comparable entry-level NVMe drives. For everyday computing they're perfectly adequate, but power users writing large files continuously should look elsewhere.
Availability
Chinese retail pricing puts the 250GB at around $50 and the 500GB at roughly $88. US and UK pricing has not been officially confirmed yet, and the NF100 has not appeared on Amazon.com or major UK retailers as of this writing. Lexar's existing SATA lines — the NS100 and NQ100 — are available in Western markets, so a broader NF100 rollout seems likely; just not imminent.
