Lexar Play SE 4TB SSD Review: The oddball of the bunch

The Lexar Play SE, or Special Edition, is the follow-up to the original PS5-focused Lexar Play. This drive is special, all right, although perhaps not in the way you would expect. Second editions of drives are often a pathway towards getting away with a hardware swap, and the Play SE, on the surface, looks deceptively like its forebearer. Underneath the capable, PS5-compliant heatsink, there are some interesting changes at play. It’s worth an extra look since 4TB drives are becoming more expensive just as the sweet spot seemed to be moving above 2TB.

The good news is that this drive is perfectly suitable for your PS5, and it could work inside a desktop, too. It’s best as a secondary or games drive rather than your primary solution, given its budget status. It’s only available at 4TB, which, given its hardware, which we’ll get into more later, firmly places it in the “extra storage” category. Superficially and by TBW specification, it looks like the original Play, which used the excellent Maxio MAP1602 controller and 232-Layer YMTC TLC flash, but appearances can be deceiving. This is a DRAM-less, QLC-infused SSD that only makes sense as a low-cost solution. Its weak performance and power efficiency keep it from being anything greater than that, as we’ll see.

Lexar Play SE Specifications

The Lexar Play SE is only available at 4TB. This is a good thing, as this drive doesn’t really make sense at other capacities. It needs at least 2TB to hit peak performance, and with the competition that exists, it has the most realistic chance of success at 4TB. It can achieve up to 7,000 / 6,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes with no IOPS given. This is satisfactory as a drive like this is not meant to be used for heavy workloads, although this controller can manage up to 700K IOPS. The warranty is for a full five years and, in addition, 800TB of writes per TB capacity. This last bit is interesting as 800TBW per TB is above the standard and is at least double what we would expect for a QLC-based drive. It’s at TLC flash levels of endurance, which is a bonus.

Lexar Play SE Software and Accessories

Lexar has two downloads for its SSDs: Lexar DiskMaster and Lexar DataShield. The first is Lexar’s SSD toolbox, which has all of the expected functions. You can check system and drive information, drive health, and for firmware updates. Drives can also be scanned for errors and performance-tested, and the application also allows for secure erase and data transfer. DataShield additionally offers encryption for data protection.

Lexar Play SE: A Closer Look

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The Lexar Play SE is single-sided and adorned with a very capable heatsink. This heatsink is PS5-compatible, as is the case with the original Lexar Play. The single-sided nature of the drive helps anticipate what we’ll be looking at hardware-wise. Knowing nothing else about the drive, we would normally expect a DRAM-less controller with denser flash. Both of these expectations are proven valid, but there is more going on here than meets the eye.

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Under the label, we see the InnoGrit IG5236 controller, one that we found to be quite good back in the day – see our Adata XPG Gammix S70 review. This controller is a competitor for SMI’s SM2264, see the Adata Legend 960 and Legend 960 Max, the legendary Phison E18, and proprietary options found in the most popular drives, such as the WD Black SN850X. It’s an eight-channel controller with double the channel count of budget controllers, and as a bonus, it comes with DRAM.

Well, we always reviewed it with DRAM, at least until today. This is the first hardware oddity of the drive. It’s nothing new for controllers to optionally support the host memory buffer, or HMB, feature in addition to hosting DRAM. HMB uses a small amount of system memory to assist in metadata caching. Often, the HMB-only controllers are cut-down versions of higher-end ones with fewer channels and no need for the full DRAM controller logic on the chip. Likewise, the higher-end drives usually have DRAM, and if HMB is for some reason enabled – this is true of some Realtek controllers we’ve seen – it is either not utilized or is used for something different than simple metadata caching.

The Play SE has no external DRAM module and therefore leverages HMB. There are some advantages to going this way. The most obvious is that manufacturers can save on cost by not implementing a DRAM module, and in some cases, that will reduce power consumption, too. The controller itself appears unchanged, but in theory, there could be some dark silicon that might reduce power consumption and heat production. It’s also possible that only four channels would be enabled, but the use of eight channels makes it easier to hit higher capacities. More likely, the IG5220 – see our HP FX900 review, among others – would be used for the lower channel count with older flash and at lower speeds. To cover all bases, we must also mention the IG5221, which is effectively an IG5220 with DRAM support – it uses the larger of the IG5220’s two form factor packages – but is not one we’ve yet seen for testing.

The IG5220/IG5221 and some other controllers could technically use 2,400 MT/s flash to reach the Play SE’s 7 GB/s, but it’s easier to handle 1,600 MT/s flash at 5 GB/s or so. The Maxio MAP1602 acts in reverse, as it is more often sold at the faster speeds. Conversely, the eight-channel IG5236 could use 1,600 MT/s or even 1,200 MT/s flash and still achieve 7 GB/s, much like the E18 can do with 96-Layer Micron and 112-Layer Kioxia flash. Lexar probably wants to use whatever is available at a good price to get this 4TB-only drive out the door. The unique memory situation we’re in right now means that, beyond BOM or variable hardware drives, you will also see more oddballs like the Play SE, though this is not unusual with budget drives in general.

Let’s look at the flash more closely. “1024” means that each of the four NAND flash modules contains 1TB of flash. The “Q” indicates QLC flash, and from the rest, we can decode the brand and generation with some guesswork involved. This flash appears to be Intel’s 144-Layer QLC flash. We’ve heard rumors that this drive used Intel’s or Solidigm’s 192-Layer QLC instead, although that should be denoted as pQLC, as the original flash design is for 5-bit or PLC operation. One indicator that this drive isn’t using that flash is the capacity. Intel’s 192-Layer PLC uses 1.67Tb dies, which will be 1.33Tb for pQLC and 1TB for pTLC. For pQLC, that would require an unusual configuration, as there would be 24 dies in total for 4TB.

Using such flash would certainly explain the high warrantied writes for a QLC-based drive, as that flash has TLC-like endurance in its pQLC mode. Solidigm typically uses that flash for its enterprise SSDs, though, and Intel’s 144-Layer QLC makes more sense on a budget drive like the Play SE, as it’s older flash that is available and designed to run at lower MT/s. This flash also technically has the endurance to hit Lexar’s TBW, but it’s possible Lexar was leaving the door open for other types of flash and was willing to put a high number here, which, for a read-heavy PS5 drive, is merely a glorified selling point.

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