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Conclusion
Right now, Lexar’s NM600 matches the company’s recently reviewed SATA-based NS200 in price, and because of that it’s hard to not recommend it if you your device supports both SATA and NVMe drives. Opting for the NM600 is the smarter choice if you are checking out the company’s products. Unfortunately, the NM600 comes in just two capacities: 240GB and 480GB. If you need more capacity, Lexar recently released an NM610 drive, with capacities that top out at 1TB.
For those looking for a speedy boot drive upgrade or small games drive, Lexar’s NM600 is a very affordable SSD for the task. It is a great value for sure. That is, unless you have some sort of pro-sumer workload. As a DRAMless SSD, it exhibits more latency under heavy write workloads than competing products, which can result in performance that is lesser than that of the Crucial MX500. But Lexar was able to optimize its performance quite well, so the drive excels under most lighter consumer application workloads.
Lexar’s NM600 kept up with or surpassed other entry-level SSDs in our testing and offers up performance that surpasses its SATA a based competition significantly. For the average consumer, this SSD will be lightning quick in daily use. It comes with hefty endurance ratings, but the warranty is a bit short, similar to other low-cost SSDs at just 3-years. This may not be a big deal to those looking to save every dollar they can, but other drives like the SATA-based MX500 boast a longer 5-year warranty in contrast.
Not only does the NM600 perform well, but it is also one of the most efficient SSDs we have tested yet, topping our efficiency charts and surpassing the WD Blue SN500 and ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro. At idle, the HMB feature causes the NM600 to consume more power than the P1 because it has to be in a higher power state to continuously update the mapping table in the host's DRAM cache. But overall, a little over 100mW more power isn’t all too much more than most competitors, and it's still less than the WD Blue SN500. The Lexar NM600 is a good choice for a mobile device just as it is a desktop, provided you don't need more capacity than 480GB, which is this drive's most spacious option.
