The Lexar Play delivers reasonable all-around performance and good power efficiency, built on a solid foundation of TLC NAND with a Maxio MAP1602 controller. The only potential drawback is pricing, which has come down a lot in the past month.
Pros
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Good all-around performance
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High power efficiency
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4TB with TLC
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8TB option in the future
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Includes a heatsink
Cons
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Check the current pricing
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Lexar decided to expand on the success of its NM790 with a second drive that has more PS5-friendly aesthetics with a capacity range that extends up to an whomping 8TB. The Play doesn’t chart a new course from the NM790 otherwise, but it does mean that it’s a great drive for a console or gaming PC where you want lots of storage capacity. The only real sticking points are the current pricing and 8TB availability, as the drive has to compete with the likes of the WD Black SN850X. This makes things challenging for the Play.
Although its hardware is nothing new, using the same Maxio MAP1602 controller and YMTC 232-layer TLC NAND as the NM790, the Play still hits the right notes with relatively reliable all-around performance and high power efficiency. Like the NM790, it's a good buy at 4TB when it’s appropriately sold as a budget drive. Prices fluctuate, but at times its price has exceeded the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro. Thankfully, that's no longer the case, but it still costs $10–$15 more than basically the same drive in the form of the Lexax NM790 4TB.
It’s also not possible to find the 8TB SKU just yet, but Lexar will have trouble undercutting the SN850X at that capacity. Still, you should keep the Play in mind when buying a high capacity drive, especially for the PS5. Just be mindful of the price and look for a good sale.
Lexar isn’t shooting for smaller capacities with the Play. The drive is only available at 2TB and larger, including the 4TB model we received for review and a future 8TB SKU. We’re sampling the 4TB today and will have more to say about the 8TB below. The Play can reach up to 7,400 / 6,500 MB/s for sequential reads and writes with no random read and write IOPS declared, but we know this hardware can go up to around 1,000K for each. It offers plenty of performance, in other words.
The drive is backed by a five-year, 800TB of writes per TB capacity warranty. This is ample and above the standard 600TB. Pricing has fallen well below the launch MSRPs, as it should. Right now, the 2TB costs $149 and the 4TB costs $254 — instead of $229 and $379, respectively. That's a move in the right direction, but it's still higher than the competition, including the Lexar NM790 as well as the $204 Silicon Power US75 that uses the same core hardware.
Lexar has three downloads for SSDs on its website: Lexar DiskMaster, Lexar DataShield, and the Lexar Recovery Tool. Lexar DiskMaster is your standard SSD toolbox that gives access to system and drive information, the health status of the drive, performance testing, firmware upgrades, secure erase, and more. Lexar DataShield is encryption software for protecting your files. Lastly, the Lexar Recovery Tool helps you recover data from your drives. Unfortunately, this last tool is probably not super useful for SSDs unless you use it immediately as SSDs will TRIM then erase data rather rapidly with poor recoverability.
The Lexar Play is adorned with an aesthetically-pleasing heatsink that's PS5-compatible and should be more than sufficient to cool the drive. On the back side we see that the drive is rated to pull up to ~7W — 3.3V / 2A, with some voltage tolerance — but it's rated for a maximum of 6W via SMART power states. In practice, it will pull even less. This drive shouldn’t ever overheat or throttle.
You could be forgiven for thinking this is a Lexar NM790 in disguise. Same brand, same hardware, what’s the deal? You can even get the NM790 with a heatsink, so it serves more or less the same purposes. Honestly, it simply seems like Lexar is simply positioning the Play for gaming while the NM790 is more versatile. There’s just not a lot to set them apart aside from looks, although that’s not a bad thing as the NM790 is a pretty solid drive.
The heatsink is not too difficult to remove, so this drive could be used in a laptop. By default the heatsink has thermal padding for both sides of the drive. This helps keep the drive from touching the base of the metal heatsink. The top thermal pad is wide and should be effective at conducting heat, although it does have to go through a label. Usually this does not harm cooling effectiveness too much.
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The first thing we notice is that the drive is single-sided. The controller is the Maxio MAP1602, specifically the F3C U variant. This version of the controller is NVMe 2.0 rather than 1.4 compliant and was designed to handle up to 4TB of flash.
Speaking of the flash, this is rebranded YMTC 232-Layer TLC, as we’ve seen on many drives like the Lexar NM790. This controller and flash combination is popular for budget drives that can put out a decent amount of performance. Especially nice is that these drives can do 4TB in a single-sided form factor at a reasonable price.
Phison’s E27T controller, usually paired with Kioxia 162-Layer BiCS6 TLC flash as on the Corsair MP600 Elite and several other drives, is a direct competitor, but so far it's really only available at up to 2TB. But let’s go back to the part about 4TB of flash.
This drive has an 8TB SKU listed. How is this achievable? Some drives in this class, like the Teamgroup MP44, used to use a different controller for 8TB, namely the Phison E18. That controller has twice the channels as well as DRAM and is double-sided. Generally, it's difficult to drive 8TB with a four-channel controller like the Play’s MAP1602, as even with a specialized variant it's only designed to handle up to eight dies per channel.
Given the prevalence of 1Tb dies, this puts a theoretical cap at 4TB. However, it’s possible to assign two or even four dies per chip signal and in this way sixty-four dies can be addressed for a whopping 8TB of flash. We haven’t seen this first-hand, yet, and our Play sample is only 4TB. However, it appears that the 8TB Play — and likely the 8TB MP44 and others — have achieved this.
So the next series of questions are: can this be done with just four NAND flash packages and, if so, does that mean a single-sided 8TB drive? Yes and no, respectively. It's possible to stack sixteen dies per package for 2TB each, so you only need four packages. However, driving this much flash with this controller can be challenging. If you’ve read our Crucial T500 4TB review, you’ll remember that this can require additional ICs — specifically, DDR multiplexers for load isolation. Essentially this allows multiple dies, say in two distinct banks, to share a channel without increased loading as the memory being accessed can be switched with the other bank being left isolated.
The real world effect is that you can manage to get 8TB working with this controller without signal integrity issues, but the downside is extra cost and PCB space for the ICs. Given how tight these drives are without the ICs — just take a look at our photos of the bare 4TB Play — the introduction of ICs means moving two of the NAND packages to the other side of the drive.
One potential optimization would be putting the ICs only topside, with the flash packages mirroring each other on each side of the PCB. This could manifest with the MAP1602 controller in the middle rather than on the edge of the drive. We unfortunately do not have an 8TB Play to look at, but the heatsink design would accommodate this. We expect the 8TB to be somewhat less efficient, though.
Ultimately, we'll have to wait and see what the 8TB might have to offer, and how much it costs at retail. But for now, let's take the 4TB Play for a spin.
