Nextorage NE5N SSD Review: One Thick SSD

The Nextorage NE5N is one cool cucumber, a fast PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD with a distinctive voluminous heatsink that helps push new levels of bandwidth. It’s faster than any 4.0 SSD on the market and remains remarkably cool while achieving those marks. The brand name is not the most recognizable, especially as Nextorage has its origins in producing drives for the PlayStation 5, but there has been a real effort to expand its portfolio. The drive tested today is just 1TB, distinct from our other PCIe 5.0 reviews with 2TB samples, allowing for a deeper analysis of how much capacity matters for newer flash used in the very fastest consumer SSDs.

If you haven’t heard of Nextorage, it began life as Sony subsidiary Sony Storage Media Solutions Corporation (SMSS) while being a joint venture with Phison. Phison designs the SSD controllers used in many drives, including all early PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The company has since acquired shares from Sony and is now effectively producing its own drives, including the NE5N. The origins make sense, as the Nextorage NEM-PA was designed for the PS5. However, it’s evident that the NE5N is made for high-end desktops, and the company already has a higher-tier version in the works.

This does not mean that the NE5N has any special sauce under the hood, but rather, it’s a competing product in the high-end SSD storage space that can fill its own niche. In this case, the heatsink clearly stands out. It could be an alternative to the Gigabyte Aorus 10000, although that drive can go bare. It lacks the fan of the reference design, as used on the Inland TD510, which is a positive in our book. This makes the NE5N an interesting choice for certain sustained workloads, but ultimately, it comes down to your needs and market pricing. 

Specifications

The Nextorage NE5N is available at 1TB and 2TB capacities with current pricing of $169.99 and $289.99, respectively. This is pretty close to the baseline when compared to the ADATA Legend 970 and similar drives, but it is somewhat expensive for what you get, so it is recommended to wait for sales. Of course, the NE5N has a unique heatsink that might help it stand out for certain builds or workloads that need extra cooling.

The drive can reach 10,000 / 10,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and 1,400K / 1,400K IOPS for random read and write IOPS. The warranty is standard at five years with 700TB of writes per TB capacity. It also does have TCG OPAL encryption support, thanks to its controller.

Software and Accessories

Nextorage offers a download of Acronis True Image OEM for backups and cloning on its site. We recommend CrystalDiskInfo to extract health information from your drive.

A Closer Look

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The NE5N has what appears to be a pretty effective heatsink, including ample thermal padding and a copper interface for the controller. Throttling will not be an issue for this drive as it has a two-deck cooling solution with heatpipe technology. Contact is quite good for all of the major components. We would recommend not removing the heatsink.

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This is the standard layout for a Phison E26 SSD, although some things are noteworthy. Nextorage lists the DRAM cache as DDR4 on its site, but it’s actually LPDDR4. This helps reduce power draw by a small amount and is the most common configuration with Phison E26 SSD controllers. The cache is more than ample, providing 2GB of DRAM for just 1TB of flash. Although otherwise unremarkable, the 1TB sample allows us to test this hardware with fewer than the normal amount of dies.

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