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

Comparison Products

The best drive to compare the Lexar Play SE to is the SanDisk WD Blue SN5100, as it’s using QLC flash and a full-fledged Gen 4 controller. However, that drive is not at 4TB and uses newer flash, so the 4TB WD Blue SN5000 is often a better comparison. If we were to look at a QLC version of the original Lexar Pla,y we would be most interested in the TeamGroup MP44Q as it uses the same controller but with comparable QLC flash. The drives listed so far are using Kioxia or YMTC flash; however, the Crucial P310 shows us what Micron QLC can do.

We have the Crucial P3 Plus, a very popular QLC-based drive, representing the older generation of Micron flash. Even that is technically newer than the QLC on the Lexar Play SE. In fact, the quasi-BOM configuration of the Play SE reminds us a lot of the Kingston NV3 instead. These are drives built to be inexpensive with whatever hardware is available. We don’t recommend any of these drives as your primary solution on a powerful desktop – they are all perfectly fine in a PS5, though – and we’ve included the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro to show you why we believe that.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

Image 1 of 3

The Play SE’s 3DMark performance is pretty bad, but it does beat the QLC-based P3 Plus. The P3 Plus has been a popular choice for use as a storage drive, a games drive, or a drive for the PS5, so this is an important comparison. The Play SE performs well enough that it would have no trouble in any of those functions and would be fine as a games drive.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

Image 1 of 3

We wouldn’t recommend a QLC-based drive for your primary or boot drive, and that includes the Play SE. It would probably be fine in a portable gaming system that takes M.2 2280 drives, but if this is to be your one and only drive and you like to use most or all of your space, then you should shoot for a TLC-based drive. TLC flash is more likely to maintain acceptable performance levels in edge cases. The Play SE would probably be okay as a secondary drive that sees more reads than writes, and that also applies to the P3 Plus and NV3.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

Image 1 of 3

The Play SE performs well enough to give an excellent PS5 experience. However, it could theoretically bog down in some situations if you spam it with writes. This is unlikely to be an issue given the likely bandwidth bottlenecks – such as your Internet connection – and this drive won’t overheat with its heatsink. In fact, the Lexar Play drives are designed specifically for the PS5, and the 4TB capacity makes it a pretty good choice. If you can find the Play SE at a lower price, it’s a good way to save some money.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

Image 1 of 3

The Play SE actually has respectable copying speeds. It’s certainly not the fastest, but it’s not the slowest, either. For transfers that fit within the pSLC cach,e especially, this drive is fast enough for daily use.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

Image 1 of 14

The Play SE’s ATTO results are all over the place. The main area where it stands out is at 4MiB, where both reads and writes seem to plummet in performance. This may be due to the flash in use as well as the drive’s capacity. 32 dies of four-plane flash will have a superpage size of 2MiB, which could throw this controller for a loop at 4MiB, also remembering that this is an odd pairing with a controller that’s been deprived of DRAM. The controller actually reports that it’s only using 16 banks of flash, which means each chip enable signal shares two dies, or 2Tb per CE.

This isn’t a problem per se, but it’s something we tend to see more often with budget drives, especially when they are using variable hardware (hardware that can be changed over the lifetime of the device), since certain controller-flash combinations are rarer. The drive does have rough reads at and beyond 256KiB – each die pair would interleave at 128KiB – but when viewed on a logarithmic scale, we see that it’s not as bad as it first looks. We would defer to CrystalDiskMark, which shows no abnormalities for sequential performance but also shows that this drive is pretty slow with the most common QD1 reads.

4KB QD1 random read performance is also not great, with relatively high latency. We would expect better from this flash – check our Solidigm P41 Plus review, among others – and it’s possible this controller cannot get the best out of it. The lack of DRAM is doing no favors, even though most QLC-based drives are DRAM-less. See the Intel 670p for an exception. The random write performance is, thankfully, closer to what we would expect, but we wouldn’t consider that to be as big an issue.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

Image 1 of 3

The Play SE’s pSLC cache can write at over 6.2 GB/s for over 156 seconds. This cache is large at around 975GB, which is nearing the maximum possible for a 4TB drive. This is slightly smaller than expected for a full-drive cache, and it’s possible that this is the case due to the reservation of some flash in order to improve endurance or to shore up post-cache performance. Less flash is therefore available for caching, although in real-world terms, this has next to no impact on the user. Some WD and SanDisk drives, like the Black SN850X, use nCache 4.0 technology with very large but not full-drive pSLC caches and are able to maintain reasonable post-cache write speeds. Intel, and later Solidigm, also used some static pSLC to achieve this same effect with the same flash as the Play SE – see the Intel 670p.

When the pSLC cache is exhausted, the drive must write either in a native QLC mode or in a folding mode where flash must be copied from the pSLC cache before servicing further incoming writes. The Play SE manages 450 MB/s in this mode, which is very good for QLC flash. This post-cache performance, when combined with the massive cache, is satisfactory for this drive’s intended role.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.

Image 1 of 4

Unfortunately, the Play SE’s power efficiency suffers a bit due to its use of an eight-channel controller. It’s the least-efficient drive on the chart, and it even loses to the eight-channel 990 Pro. This isn’t surprising as the IG5236 isn’t the most efficient controller, and the 4TB 990 Pro has updated, optimized hardware and firmware. The drive is still efficient enough that it will work in most systems, but it could be harder to recommend in a laptop or other mobile device, assuming you went sans heatsink.

Speaking of the heatsink, it’s very effective. This drive has four full NAND flash packages and a large controller, so it has plenty of surface area to dissipate heat. Combined with the heatsink, the drive hit a maximum of 51°C during our testing. This is as cool as a cucumber. If you were to run it without a heatsink, though, we would recommend a thin heatspreader or thermal padding to take advantage of the extensive surface area. Running it bare should also be okay, but it is not the intended way to use the drive.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Lexar Play SE Bottom Line

The Lexar Play SE is an unusual drive, utilizing a relatively high-end controller for a budget solution. This controller is run without DRAM to presumably save on cost and, despite the high TBW, uses older QLC flash from a bygone era.

We have seen DRAM-less eight-channel SSD controllers before – check out our Biwin Black Opal X570 review – but most budget controllers are only four-channel. Eight channels make it easier to hit high speeds and to host higher capacities. After all, this drive is only available at 4TB, but it’s still an unusual configuration. The IG5236 controller itself has a mixed history as it was a champion for some time despite early firmware issues, but later on, problems crept up again, and its reputation has since been tarnished. Lexar using it here is almost certainly done to save on cost.

So, what do you get for all of this? Well, the drive is designed specifically for the PlayStation 5 and has a heatsink to match. This is the follow-up to the original Lexar Play, and there are so many similarities that you would be forgiven for mistaking the two drives. Both emphasized the 4TB capacity, and both have 3,200TBW at that capacity. Yet, the original Play’s Maxio MAP1602 controller has a solid reputation and is more efficient than the IG5236. It’s also paired with superior, 232-Layer TLC flash – it’s a PS5 version of the NM790, an extremely popular and successful drive. The PS5-compliant heatsink is nice on both drives, but the NM790 and original Play have wider applications than the Play SE. The Play SE can work outside of the PS5, but it’s like a dozen other budget drives that use random hardware if you ever felt like rolling the dice. Otherwise, the NM790 and sister drives remain a good choice if you don’t have the money for the WD Black SN850X.

The Lexar Play SE is not the worst drive we’ve tested, though, as there are some bright spots. The drive’s performance and power efficiency leave something to be desired, but it’s still above older Gen 3 options. The flash is good for what it is – we’ll take it and the high TBW over sketchy, older stuff – and it’s not using any of the very worst controllers. It runs plenty cool with the heatsink and, perhaps most importantly, 4TB is a lot of flash. You could do worse on a budget. This is a Lexar drive that you can semi-trust not to use low-grade flash. Still, we found this drive to be more interesting as a novelty than a real storage solution outside of the PS5, and it’s a good one to use as an example of what you can get with some of the cheaper drives out there. Caveat emptor, buyer beware, with the Play SE being in between those drives and the more reliable ones.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck