Lexar has unveiled the Muse, a drive it calls the world’s thinnest portable SSD, at IFA 2026 in Berlin, timed to the brand’s 30th anniversary. The drive measures 80x48x3.8mm (3.15×1.89×0.15in) and tapers to about 1mm at its edges, a shape closer to a credit card than the boxy external drives most people are used to carrying. Lexar built it for people who record video on their phones and need to offload footage without stopping to plug into a laptop, the same crowd that currently snaps bulky magnetic battery packs onto the back of a phone and then has to work around the extra thickness while shooting.
Lexar’s own materials describe the design in promotional terms, calling it a card-like form with premium minimalist aesthetics built for creators’ mobile workflows. The numbers that actually matter are the 3.8mm body and the roughly 1mm edge, not the language wrapped around them.
Why Lexar calls the Muse the thinnest portable SSD
Getting the body that thin meant giving up the USB-C port entirely, since a standard port would have forced the drive to be far thicker along at least one edge. In its place, Lexar built SnapLink, a proprietary pogo-pin connector held to the drive by N52-grade neodymium magnets, the strongest grade commonly used in consumer electronics.
A separate magnetic cable clips onto the pins and terminates in a standard USB-C plug at the other end, so the drive itself never carries a port that needs reinforcing or a door to keep dust out. The same magnets let the Muse snap onto a magnetic sleeve that mounts it to the back of a compatible Android phone or iPhone, in place of the battery packs and camera rigs creators currently stack there just to add storage.
The cost of dropping USB-C
TechPowerUp’s show-floor report notes the obvious downside: lose the SnapLink cable, and there is no fallback port to plug a normal USB-C lead into instead. Every other slim external SSD on the market still exposes some kind of standard port, even a recessed one hidden behind a flap.
Lexar has traded that redundancy for thinness, which is a reasonable bet for a drive aimed at video shooters who keep all their gear in one bag and are unlikely to misplace a single cable, but it puts the burden of long-term support on Lexar: if the cable or sleeve ever go out of production, the drive becomes unusable with anything else. The thinness claim itself only holds until another vendor ships something thinner.
What else Lexar showed at IFA
The Muse is one part of a wider 30th-anniversary showcase for Lexar, which is marking three decades in memory and storage this year and used Berlin to frame the drive as the start of its next chapter. Lexar also used the show to demonstrate its AI Storage Core work, including a next-generation Gen 5 SSD and a Gen 5 Storage Stick rated at up to 11 GB/s, aimed at compact AI devices that need faster local model storage and quicker model switching. Lexar has not published pricing, capacity options or a release date for the Muse itself, so those are the details worth watching as the rest of the IFA 2026 coverage lands.
