Shenzhen Longsys Electronics, the Chinese parent company of Lexar, announced that it’s expecting a net profit of $1.36 to $1.62 billion (or 9.2 to 11 billion yuan) for the first half of 2026, smashing its year-ago profit of just $2.2 million. This represents an incredible jump of 61,818% to 73,636%, and it comes on revenue forecasts of $3.24 to $3.68 billion (22 to 25 billion yuan) — more than double the $1.5 billion it achieved last year, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

This massive growth is attributed to the increased demand for—you guessed it— memory and storage chips due to the global AI infrastructure buildout, and all that demand is competing for limited memory wafer capacity. Longsys says that it has signed long-term agreements and memoranda of understanding with global memory wafer suppliers to ensure supply stability.

The company did not specifically say which memory and storage chip suppliers it has contracted with, but many Chinese memory brands have been ditching the three mainstream suppliers — Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix — for CXMT and YMTC silicon. U.S. manufacturers like Corsair, Dell, and HP, have started considering chips from these suppliers, despite being labeled as Chinese military companies by the Pentagon. Even Apple, which used to have massive sway on its suppliers, has started lobbying Washington for access to CXMT chips as Samsung and SK hynix say that the AI-driven shortages could last until 2027 or even longer.

Longsys’ unprecedented growth has resulted in a 12.5% jump on its stock price in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange over the weekend, which has more than doubled from its lowest point just three months ago. Aside from its record earnings, the company also received the go-ahead from Chinese regulators to raise up to $544 million (3.7 billion yuan) through a private share placement. This would allow it to directly offer shares to select investors and fund research and development on high-end memory products, including AI-focused storage solutions, storage and memory controllers, among others.

The memory and chip shortage is hurting PC makers and consumers, with the PC market expected to shrink by 14% this year. As the market becomes desperate for alternative sources to mainstream manufacturers, Chinese firms CXMT and YMTC, as well as other downstream suppliers like Longsys and Biwin, are taking the opportunity to challenge established Western brands.

Lexar's Regional Manager for Australia & New Zealand, Chris Xia, said that he personally thinks RAM prices are expected to double by the end of the year. While there have been a few instances of RAM module prices stabilizing and even some retailers selling them for a discount or bundled with other PC parts, he said that this is just sellers making an effort to make their inventory move and make way for new stocks, which are expected to be priced higher.

The current AI build-out is siphoning all the memory chips available from the traditional big three suppliers — Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron — with nearly all production capacity getting allocated towards high-bandwidth memory. Consumers are getting left behind, and as supplies dry up, their prices continue to go up.

Sapphire PR manager Edward Crisler said last December 2025 that DRAM prices will begin to stabilize in the next six to eight months, albeit at higher prices. However, the situation seems to have changed, and industry insiders now expect prices to continue going up towards the end of the year. Xia said that industry costs take up to eight to nine months to affect consumer prices, and the current market pricing trend has only been going up.

Some consumers get hope when they see RAM kits getting discounts or retailers lowering the list prices of these items, but Chris said that these are often the result of sellers trying to get rid of old inventory. They do this so that they can get some liquidity back and to make way for new stocks coming in from suppliers, usually at a higher price. Another thing that adds to the confusion is that some distributors manage to get their hands on unsold inventory from other regions that are still priced lower compared to what’s arriving now. Because of this, they’re able to sell at a lower price — but only until supplies last. Once the old stock runs out, they will eventually be forced to increase retail prices as market forces catch up with the low supply and high demand. Xia recommends that if you need to buy RAM, you should buy it now. Don’t wait for lower prices as they won’t arrive for years to come.

The memory chip crisis is going beyond desktop computers and laptops, which are expected to see shipments contract by more than 10%. Motherboard sales have already collapsed by more than 25% as the increasing RAM and SSD prices are making enthusiasts think twice before building a new system. Smartphones are expected to either get more expensive or see lower and slower memory configurations, and even action camera manufacturer GoPro is in trouble due to memory chip shortages and lower sales.

Most of the industry is focused on RAM and SSDs when it comes to the chip shortage that exploded in late 2025, but another storage segment is also being greatly affected by the lack of supply. According to a PCWorld investigation, USB drives and memory cards are showing massive price hikes from last year. In fact, we checked out several memory products on Amazon and compared their price histories on CamelCamelCamel and discovered that the median price increase across formats and capacities is a whopping 123%.

While these storage formats are often slower than SSDs, they still use NAND chips from wafers that could be manufactured from the same production lines, with their differences coming from binning and quality tiers. So, it would make sense for memory chip fabs to optimize their production lines for higher-bin NAND chips for SSDs. These drives are often used by AI data center customers who are willing to pay a premium to secure the storage they need. This optimization, in turn, could lead to a smaller supply of low-bin NAND chips for USB flash drive and memory card manufacturing, leading to higher costs for brands like SanDisk and Lexar, among others.

Because of this, manufacturers are increasingly turning towards more premium products to justify their prices. Just last week, SanDisk quietly released a 2TB variant of its top-tier Extreme Pro UHS-II SD card for $2,000, meaning this card would cost photographers, videographers, and other users $0.98 per GB. By comparison, the lower-tier 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-I SDXC card only costs $440, or about $0.21 per GB. SanDisk isn’t the only company doing this, as other manufacturers like Lexar and Kingston both have premium memory cards that are in a similar price range.

Memory card manufacturers have no choice but to adapt to the current realities of the market. “Facing the shortage of supply, our strategy is to focus on high-end products instead of expanding our factories or manufacturing,” Lexar Senior Marketing Director Lincoln Lin said during a company-sponsored media trip. He also added, “We think this is what we should do in the current supply shortage situation. Because of the supply limitations, we have to release more high-value products and keep some differentiation for our consumers.”

The market response to increasing prices has also been interesting. Lexar EU General Manager Grace Su pointed out that the company has prepared lower-capacity and lower-performance drives to give buyers options. “This is a curiosity for me as buyers have in their mind, ‘I would like a 1TB [drive]. 1TB is the minimum capacity I want to have. Now that I can only afford 512GB, I can wait,’” Su said. While she said this in reference to consumers purchasing SSDs, it could also apply to those looking for memory cards who need a minimum capacity for their specific use-case.

Lexar recently invited Tom’s Hardware, along with several other journalists, to visit its Shenzhen office, which sits north of Hong Kong, as well as its research and development facilities at Zhongshan across the bay. From there, the company took us to their Suzhou factory, about an hour and a half to the west of Shanghai, to explore their automotive storage production line.

The company is primarily known for its flash memory products, particularly for high-performance microSD, SD, and CFexpress cards for cameras and other portable devices, as well as flash drives and card readers. However, the company has recently been making a push towards modern SSDs and RAM modules, and it’s also working on the next generation of AI-ready storage solutions.

We'll start with our factory tour on this page, and then move to the Q and A session with Lexar executives and the history of the company on the second page.

Moving beyond memory cards and flash drives

Lexar has continued producing removable storage solutions after its 2017 acquisition by Longsys. Just one year after the purchase, the brand was the first to commercially release a 1TB SD card. The company also claimed that it had the world’s fastest CFexpress Type B cards in 2022, which is crucial for both photographers shooting in burst mode and videographers shooting at high-resolution 4K video. Just last year, the company also released the world’s first stainless steel SD cards, featuring an IP68 environmental protection rating while also providing much more strength than regular plastic SD card models.

But now that Lexar was under the wing of Longsys, the company had access to formidable resources for research and development, as well as the nearly two decades of experience that its parent firm had in working with flash storage. Although the company had already been making USB flash drives before 2017, it was only after the Longsys purchase that the company started making and selling proper drives.

One of the first Lexar SSDs we’ve seen is the NM600 M.2 NVMe SSD, which, although it did not offer mind-bending performance, was an affordable and efficient SSD that offered a great solution for those looking for relatively affordable storage. Since then, Lexar has released several NVMe SSDs, like the NM790, which offered excellent sustained read and write speeds while staying power efficient and is priced competitively, especially at the 4TB capacity, as well as the 1TB Lexar Play M.2 2230 SSD, which is one of the best solutions for expanding storage on gaming handheld devices.

The company has also started building its own storage controllers, which manage how data is stored, moved, corrected, and retrieved from the NAND flash chips used by memory cards. This would allow Lexar to have more in-depth control of how its memory products would perform and differentiate its offerings from the competition. At the moment, Lexar’s Silver Plus microSD, Blue microSD, Silver Plus SD, and Silver SD cards already use in-house controllers.

Aside from building its own storage controllers and expanding into solid state drives, the company also ventured into RAM with its basic DDR4-2666 C19 memory modules in 2020 and the Hades gaming RAM the following year. By 2023, the company made the Ares RGB DDR5-6000 C34 gaming RAM, which supports both Intel XMP 3.0 and AMD EXPO.

Of course, Lexar also saw the need for specialized storage in the age of AI. Because of this, it’s planning to release its AI Storage Core solution, which is more than just a faster, more performant memory solution. Of course, these will have higher read and write speeds, which is crucial for the massive amounts of data that AI handles, but will also have better encryption to protect the sensitive data handled by AI models. Lexar also says that they’ll be more robust, especially for applications in AI-powered vehicles and robots, as well as having hot-swapping capabilities to make it more convenient to switch devices without requiring a reboot.

The company says that it will offer multiple configuration options for AI Storage Core devices, ensuring that manufacturers and end-users can pick one that’s optimized for their application. It’s also working with various AI vendors, ensuring that Lexar’s storage solutions will be supported in future AI applications, allowing for easier and direct access to the data stored within them. There’s also development of supporting snapshots directly on the storage device’s firmware, giving users a secure backup directly on the device and making it easier to restore their data in case something goes wrong during the AI workflow, making it easier to roll back to an earlier snapshot.

Of course, Lexar cannot achieve all its plans without putting in the effort to develop new technologies. So, the company invited us to explore their various sites to see what it’s doing to achieve its goal of “Bridging Continents and Powering the World.”

Research and development for next-generation storage technologies

One of the first places we visited was the Longsys Innovation Laboratory, located in the Foresee Building at Zhongshan. This is where Lexar’s parent company works on developing next-generation products, including DDR5 and LPDDR5/5X memory modules, PCIe 5.0 storage solutions, UFS4.1 memory cards, as well as CXL2.0/3.0 for data centers and AI systems. The lab covers an area of over 9,000 square feet and is staffed by over 50 personnel, of which 20 are full-time engineers, scientists, and researchers.

Everything begins at the Design Simulation & Signal Analysis Lab, where new Lexar products are developed, validated, and engineered. The Design Simulation Lab is where upcoming storage solutions are tested for thermal performance, structural rigidity, and signal and power integrity, while the Signal Analysis lab looks at the high-speed signals being sent throughout the entire system to ensure everything stays in spec and operates reliably.

Since Lexar relies on third-party suppliers for NAND and DRAM supplies, it must ensure the quality of the dies it receives and know exactly what’s inside each product it manufactures. This is where the Chip Resource Analysis Lab comes in, where multiple high-end machines test timings, memory redundancy, and the memory core, as well as running accelerated aging under stress (also known as burn-in testing), to ensure the quality and reliability of Lexar products over time.

There are several labs that deal with completed products. There’s the System Verification Lab, where finished storage and memory items are tested for their power draw and timings, ensuring that Lexar DRAM meets JEDEC specifications. Lexar has a high-end gaming PC installed in the lab so that they can run their hardware on various benchmarking apps like AIDA64, 3DMark, and PCMark.

The Reliability Lab is where things are getting interesting, as Lexar puts its various products through their paces here. It has various testing machines, including the Drop Tester for simulating dropping an item from a height of up to 1.5 meters or 4 feet to a concrete or steel floor and the Roller Drop Tester, which continuously tumbles items between 5 to 25 RPM. There’s also the Plug-in/out Force Test machine, which simulates plugging in a memory card into a slot thousands of times and with various levels of force, the Tensile Test machine, which basically pulls on materials to see how much strength it takes to break them apart, and several other devices that check the durability of their prototypes and other products.

Aside from physical strength, the company also tests for electrostatic discharge resistance in its ESD lab, ensuring that its memory cards, storage drives, and memory modules aren’t killed by everyday static that people build up from their environment.

The tests we’ve mentioned above are mostly limited to day-to-day use. At the end of the hall sits the Environmental Lab, where Lexar puts its prototypes and products through the wringer. There are four testing machines here — the Salt Spray Test, which accelerates aging through a corrosive environment, the Precision High-Temperature Oven, where Lexar products are exposed to high temperatures while they are running, the Highly-Accelerated Stress Test, for reliability failure analysis, and the Dye Penetration Test, which looks at the effects of thermal shock on various components.

Besides the ESD Lab, you’d find the X-ray Lab, where the tiny wiring and connections in the chip are analyzed. Inside it, you’ll find a combined 2D X-Ray and CT Scan machine, allowing Lexar engineers to find minute, microscopic defects. There’s also the Failure Analysis Lab, which looks at how the items fail after this series of tests, allowing Lexar to figure out what went wrong with them and rectify their shortcomings, ensuring that they do not fail once out in the real world.

Last, but not least, we visited the Materials Analysis Labs, where the scientists and engineers visually inspect the chips. Note that they do not just place them under a microscope — instead, this is an involved process where they would put the memory or storage module they want to inspect in resin and then use a precision cutter machine to exactly slice the material and reveal the area where the suspected damage is.

Now, all the testing here is done directly on the Lexar products and prototypes. However, storage and memory do not exist in a vacuum — instead, they must work with a massive number of different devices, like cameras, drones, security cameras, gaming handheld devices, desktops, laptops, tablets, dashcams, and so much more. So, our next stop was the Longsys Quality Labs.

An extensive compatibility testing lab

Lexar has an extensive portfolio of memory and storage products, including CFexpress cards, SD cards, microSD cards, the NM card for some Huawei phones, portable SSDs, USB flash drives, M.2 and SATA SSDs, DDR4 and DDR5 memory modules, card readers, enclosures, and more. If Lexar plans to release any new product, it must ensure that it will work across a wide range of devices already on the market. Because of this, Longsys Quality Labs keeps more than 1,200 different gadgets across 35 categories to ensure that it can test its products before release.

For example, we saw more than 30 handheld gaming consoles on one desk, featuring popular brands and models like the Steam Deck, ROG Ally X, Lenovo Legion Go, and the Nintendo Switch 2, as well as from more niche brands like OneX Player, Ambernic, and more. There are also several drones and action cameras from DJI, as well as shelves of DSLRs, mirrorless, and point-and-shoot cameras from Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Fujifilm. The Lexar team also had multiple phones, including those from Chinese brands like Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo, as well as popular international brands such as iPhone and Samsung. Aside from these flash devices, other rooms also stored a ton of more mundane gadgets, like dashcams, security cameras, and even automotive modules.

After exploring the lab, we visited the Memory History Museum, where Lexar showed how storage technologies developed from prehistoric knots to the SSDs that we know today. We ended our day there, as our next stop would be the company’s manufacturing base in Suzhou, a two-hour flight from Shenzhen, which we took the following day.

Exploring the Longforce automotive storage production facility

Our entire group landed in Shanghai, and we took a one-and-a-half-hour drive to the Longforce Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd., which is the company’s manufacturing arm. We then made our way to the company’s production line for automotive storage, where we saw how NAND silicon wafers are turned into automotive-grade storage solutions. Since this is a silicon production line, we all had to wear cleanroom suits and get blasted with air jets before entering the actual production area. That way, we minimize the chances of bringing in contaminants that would affect yield rates.

The NAND arrives from the suppliers in wafer form, where it must first undergo taping, which is the mounting of the wafer to a backing material to ensure its rigidity during processing. That’s because a silicon wafer is extremely thin, and the backing material will protect it from cracking. From here, the wafer first undergoes pre-grinding, which thins out the wafer and makes it ready for cutting. It’s then cut into pieces with a laser using a technique called stealth dicing, because the cuts were made under the surface. From there, the wafer is finally fully ground to bring the wafer to its final thickness.

Once all of that is completed, the wafer is then finally mounted, and the tape is removed through DDS. It then goes through various processes until the die is mounted onto a substrate. From there, it will go through wire bonding, which connects all the layers of the die to the substrate, and be packaged via a C-Mold process. From there, it receives branding, and solder balls are attached to the underside of the substrate to make it ready for attachment to a PCB.

Note that the process does not end there, as the chips are all built together into a single molded panel. They must first be cut into individual pieces through singulation. Once that is done, they go through final testing and quality control, and then the chips are packaged for delivery to clients.

Let's move to the executive Q and A on the following page.

We visited a lot of places in so little time, so we did not get a chance to get to know Lexar’s leadership team a bit deeper. Nevertheless, some of the journalists who joined the tour were still able to ask them a few questions regarding the brand and the state of the memory and storage market today.

30 years of Lexar

Before we dive into anything else, let’s look at the quick history of Lexar. The storage company was founded in 1996 in San Jose, California, after it was spun off from audio semiconductor company Cirrus Logic. The company focused on flash memory technologies, tapping into the massive opportunity presented by the booming digital camera landscape, which began in the late 90s and exploded in the early 2000s. After nearly 10 years as an independent company, Micron Technology bought the firm in 2006.

Lexar partnered with Kodak in 2004 to produce a Kodak-branded 64MB SD card, which the two companies extended for another five years in 2007. It was during this period that the latter started producing 1GB and 2GB SD cards for the American camera brand, as well as the 128MB Picture Card UFC Drive, which worked both as a memory card and as a USB flash drive.

Aside from this push on consumer-grade memory, Lexar also developed storage media that focused on professional photographers with its CompactFlash (CF) cards. Many pro-grade DSLRs relied on this form factor during this time, which was larger, more robust, and often delivered performance better than comparable SD cards. The company was the first to deliver a 256GB CF card in 2012, which it released alongside an SDXC UHS-I card. It then doubled down on this focus the following year by releasing the Professional Workflow solution — a docking station that allowed you to mix-and-match card readers and portable SSD modules on a single high-performance base station, keeping all your portable memory needs in one place.

However, Micron decided to discontinue the Lexar brand by 2017, saying that it wanted to focus on higher value markets and channels. One of the reasons behind this move is the reduced popularity of dedicated cameras, especially as smartphones, with their built-in cameras, became more popular in the early to mid-2010s. Furthermore, Android smartphones started losing their expandable memory feature around 2015, with Samsung being the first one to drop it with the Galaxy S6.

These changing market conditions, alongside increasing competition, meant that Micron wanted to exit the consumer memory market and focus its attention on more profitable products. Fortunately, the company didn’t shutter the brand — instead, it offered the entire division for sale, with Longsys acquiring it completely in 2017.

Longsys is a China-based flash storage company founded in 1999, focusing on research and development, design, testing, packaging, manufacturing, and sales of storage solutions. It already had a strong presence in industrial and embedded storage solutions with its B2B Foresee brand, so the company saw a unique opportunity when Micron decided to sell Lexar. The purchase gave the Chinese company a chance to gain a foothold in Lexar’s market, while at the same time continuing the brand’s legacy of high-quality, high-performance removable devices.

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

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.

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.

MORE: Best SSDs

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MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Lexar needs no introduction. The previous-gen NM790 changed the landscape for capacious, budget SSDs when it came out at 4TB with an affordable price. The company also has other great memory products, but arguably the NM790 put them on the map in the PC storage space. We didn’t like the NM800 Pro quite as much, as it really wasn’t a budget drive, and the controller had issues in the long run. Now it has a successor: the NM1090 Pro, also available at that tasty 4TB point. Is this another winner, or will this drive end up forgotten?

We’re happy Lexar went for 4TB out of the gate on this one, and that’s the capacity we’re reviewing today. However, the drive is pretty well-priced at 2TB, too, and we can recommend either capacity. This drive has DRAM, unlike the NM790, following in the footsteps of the NM800 Pro. However, given the other high-end drives released recently, the NM1090 Pro has one foot on the budget side of the line. It uses older flash and is priced competitively, which works in its favor. This is not the only drive in this category – the Acer Predator GM9000 has the same hardware – and more competition is due from performance DRAM-less drives like the Biwin Black Opal X570, too.

This means you have to shop around. The NM1090 Pro, in our opinion, makes the most sense as a secondary drive at higher capacities. It’s not really the best option for laptops, and there are certainly faster drives out there. If your system has two or more PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, though, this could be a roaring games drive that saves you some money without any real deficiencies for that type of usage. It also drops the drawbacks of high power consumption, including at idle, and poor power efficiency that early PCIe 5.0 drives had.

Lexar NM1090 Pro Specifications

The Lexar NM1090 Pro is available at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB with current prices at $139.99, $199.99, and $379.99. This makes the 4TB the best deal and that is what we’re reviewing today. Peak performance can be hit at 2TB, though, with sequential reads and writes up to 14,000 / 13,000 MB/s and IOPS up to 2,100K / 1,800K for random reads and writes. Lexar offers a standard 5-year warranty with 700TB of writes per TB of capacity, which is more than the typical 600TB, but not a significant enough difference to be meaningful.

If the NM1090 Pro is to succeed, it needs to be priced right, and at the time of review, it mostly is. It offers a discount over the most common new high-end Gen 5 drives, such as the Crucial T710 and the WD_Black SN8100 from SanDisk, and the only drive that really comes close to it is the Samsung 9100 Pro. It’s bound to outperform the slower Phison E26-based drives, like the Crucial T700, and it’s also more efficient than the faster ones like the Crucial T705. This makes it an interesting “budget” high-end drive at 2TB and 4TB, possibly offering a second-drive solution for enthusiasts

Lexar NM1090 Pro Software and Accessories

Lexar has two downloads available for the NM1090 Pro: Lexar DiskMaster and Lexar DataShield. DiskMaster is your standard SSD toolbox application with S.M.A.R.T. disk health information, performance testing, diagnostics, firmware upgrades, a secure erase function, and data transfer functionality. This is pretty standard stuff but it’s nice to have convenient downloads. For alternatives we recommend CrystalDiskInfo for health tracking and MultiDrive for Windows-based cloning or imaging, or Clonezilla for a bootable imaging solution.

Lexar NM1090 Pro: A Closer Look

We regret to inform you that the Lexar NM1090 Pro is not single-sided, although that’s not as big a deal these days. Especially for high-end drives like this. Using more NAND flash packages means fewer dies stacked per package, which can be easier to manufacture. Signal integrity and timing can become issues with large die stacks, which are often alleviated by using specialized chips within the packages. Typically, the maximum is 16 dies per package (16DP), although 8 dies (8DP/ODP) is much more common. The possibility of stacking up to 32 (32DP) does exist, but is not something we’ve seen yet in consumer drives. The NM1090 Pro is using 1Tb TLC flash drives so, at 4TB, requires 8 dies per package.

The NM1090 Pro uses the excellent SMI SM2508 controller. For more technical details, please refer to our original preview. It’s an eight-channel controller with 4 chip enable signals per channel, which means it should handle up to 8TB of flash without a problem and up to 16TB with 2Tb dies. It does have DRAM, which in this case is Foresee LPDDR4x. Using this type of DRAM can reduce power consumption.

The flash appears to be 232-Layer TLC from Micron, which is a generation behind at this point. This flash was used to good effect on the popular Crucial T705 and Crucial T500. Micron has since gone up to 276 layers with an iterative improvement, which, with this same SM2508 controller, has proven to be very power-efficient on the Crucial T710. We’ve seen this controller with older flash on the Acer Predator GM9000 as well, and the result was a drive that falls somewhere between the original Phison E26 and newer, higher-end controllers and flash, including the Phison E28 with BiCS8 TLC. The NM1090 Pro should perform similarly to the Acer, but the capacity change mixes things up a bit and is worth careful consideration if you’re looking for the largest drive possible.

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Comparison Products

The Lexar NM1090 Pro, in essence, competes with the original line of high-end PCIe 5.0 SSDs built on Phison’s E26 SSD controller. Although that controller had three “levels” of performance, we’re looking at the top end: the Corsair MP700 Pro SE is a good representative. The NM1090 Pro is more likely to compete with the higher-end options, such as the Sandisk WD_Black SN8100 and Samsung 9100 Pro, on the merits of price rather than performance or even power efficiency. Once Phison moves past the E26 with E28-based upgrades, we expect the drive to also contend with newer drives, particularly on the cost front.

Thanks to its DRAM, though, the NM1090 Pro will have an easy time against E31T-based drives like the Crucial P510, even when they have newer flash. In some ways, it might have to compete with DRAM-less drives, such as the Biwin Black Opal X570, which use Maxio’s unique eight-channel solution, since such drives have high performance but may use older flash to bring the price down. We don’t have enough data to go on for a full comparison there yet, but we expect that DRAM does give the NM1090 Pro the advantage. This means that it will fill a role similar to older E18-based drives – like the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G – which were fast but not quite Black SN850X or 990 Pro fast. This makes the most sense at higher capacities, where you want the storage space and bandwidth but don’t necessarily need something slightly faster that costs more.

Lastly, we wanted to see how far Lexar has come from its super-popular NM790. That drive was always a winner at 4TB for its cost, and the NM1090 Pro can, in some ways, fill the same role. It’s not exactly the same, but if you’re looking for a 4TB drive and are caught between PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0, the comparison here will show you just how much you have to give up. Not shown is the NM1090 Pro’s predecessor, the NM980 Pro, mainly because the InnoGrit IG5236 controller on that drive has since gained a poor reputation. We think the NM1090 Pro’s SMI SM2508 should prove to be more reliable.

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.

The Lexar NM1090 Pro should match the Acer Predator GM9000, and it does. These two drives are clearly above older PCIe 4.0 drives, as well as the mid-level PCIe 5.0 ones. They feel somewhat like the Phison E18-based drives – such as the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G – did when facing the WD Black SN850X and Samsung 990 Pro. That is, they are high-end but don’t quite feel like the fastest drive out there. Drives like the NM1090 Pro have a bullseye more on the backs of Phison E26-based drives, like the Corsair MP700 Pro SE, because it can now offer a comparable experience with much better power efficiency.

We do think the Sandisk WD_Black SN8100 remains the king for load times as it has the lowest latency in multiple tests, including this one. The BiCS8 TLC flash works excellently with SMI’s SM2508 controller. But you don’t really need a drive of that caliber for games, and if you still want PCIe 5.0 bandwidth, you can settle for something like the NM1090 Pro and get that 4TB of space at a lower price point.

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.

The NM1090 Pro fares a bit better than the GM9000 in PCMark 10, but not by enough to make a real difference. The take-home from these results is similar to what we got from the 3DMark benchmark: this drive beats everything that came before it technologically, and it fits the role of being a competitor to the original wave of high-end PCIe 5.0 drives. It doesn’t quite match the MP700 Pro SE here, but it’s fast enough that with its power efficiency and potentially better selling price that it could be a reasonable choice depending on your needs.

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.

Right now, we’re still looking at PCIe 4.0 for console applications, which means that any PCIe 5.0 drive would be overkill. However, not everybody buys a drive to put it in and leave it forever. If you’re buying a drive that will be repurposed later, the NM1090 Pro could potentially make sense, and it is more efficient than the original high-end PCIe 5.0 drives, so it should run cool in this scenario.

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.

DiskBench is one benchmark where we first start to see issues with the NM1090 Pro, specifically focusing on its capacity. The Predator GM9000 has identical hardware at 2TB and doesn’t have the same issues that the 4TB NM1090 Pro does. In theory, these should write at the same speed with both having large enough caches and similar peak write speeds. The NM1090 Pro is the larger drive and will have a larger cache, though, which could impact write consistency.

For larger transfers, the NM1090 Pro should probably perform just fine, but the results here set off some warning bells that force us to analyze the data more closely in our write saturation test. While it’s possible the grade of flash is different on these drives, we suspect instead that Lexar has a different pSLC caching pattern that may or may not be due to the capacity difference. After all, 4TB means 32 dies versus the Predator GM9000’s 16, which means there could be a gap with TLC speeds beyond the cache as well.

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.

ATTO is useful for pointing out performance nuances of the drive. Here, the NM1090 Pro largely performs as expected with a small dip for 512KiB reads – the same is true for the Predator GM9000 and the MP700 Pro SE. There’s also a large dip at 2MiB for reads, which we also see for the MP700 Pro SE, which uses a different controller but the same flash, but not so much for the Predator GM9000.

It’s not unusual for drives to struggle here due to the nature of newer flash, which has more planes than back in the day, and how things are parallelized with channels and more dies. 4TB is just a harder capacity to hit with Micron flash – we see the same dip with the 4TB Crucial T500 – and that might be related to the reason we see multiplexors on the T500 and the Crucial P510. Signal integrity at higher speeds can be an issue, and that is one reason Phison had to optimize its E26 controller to reliably hit over 14 GB/s. The E28 has no such issue, but in our testing, it’s been using Kioxia/SanDisk BiCS8 flash instead. We would state that Micron’s flash favors capacity and bandwidth more generally, though.

The read problems persist in CrystalDiskMark when we examine QD1 sequential reads. The result isn’t great with the 1MB block size, as the NM1090 Pro falls behind even the mid-range P510. With more queue depth or with writes, there are no problems. 4KB QD1 random read and write latencies fare better, as the NM1090 puts up a good showing, with the main winners being the E28 engineering sample and the SN8100. Those two drives use the aforementioned BiCS8 TLC flash, which has proven to provide excellent latency. We’ve speculated in the past that this is likely due to optimization for the four-plane, rather than six-plane, flash, making it more agile than YMTC’s and Micron’s.

When Kioxia/Sandisk backports this approach for 112-Layer BiCS5 with the upcoming BiCS9 flash, which would have more flexibility with the smaller 512Gb dies, we might see some surprising results. Traditionally, bit-cost scalable (BiCS) flash has been designed to achieve the best density per dollar, but the six-plane flash of Micron and YMTC favors capacity even more, with the extra planes also offering higher bandwidth potential, which is a factor if you also want to achieve top sequential speeds. The 1TB Crucial T710 specifications reinforce this last point. However, enthusiasts tend to favor low latency, and many markets want or need smaller drives, so there’s room here for both approaches. As far as the NM1090 Pro goes, it performs well enough for its niche, but there are definite weak points from its choice of flash, and that’s something to remember if you’re shopping PCIe 5.0 drives.

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.

The 4TB NM1090 Pro initially writes in the temporary and fast single-bit pSLC mode at an average of over 12.5 GB/s for 65 seconds. The cache is about 814GB in size, which is large but not the largest possible for a drive of this size. It’s more than ample. It’s also still small enough that the drive can hit a direct-to-TLC mode of over 6.6 GB/s, which is the fastest we’ve ever seen any drive write outside of pSLC, with the Sabrent Rocket 5 Plus coming in second. We note here that, technically, flash can operate in multiple modes, such as 2-bit pMLC, and the 4-bit QLC on the Micron 2600 also has a 3-bit pTLC mode. Likewise, 5-bit PLC could operate in these other modes, with Solidigm enterprise drives operating that flash as if it were QLC.

We point that out because the NM1090 Pro’s performance here could be mistaken for pMLC but, given the sudden drops to about 2.4 GB/s with a steady state also at that speed we can guess it is being forced to fold – that is, to copy data from the cache to the native flash to free up space in a way that slows down incoming writes – which plausibly allows Lexar to have this unique pattern on the 4TB SKU. Typically, you would expect something more like the Predator GM9000’s result, with an average write speed around 3.9+ GB/s as the ceiling for this flash. However, we know it can do more, with the 2TB Sabrent drive mentioned above managing 4.45 GB/s. The result here is faster but less consistent writes, which, actually, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A 4TB drive of this caliber – one that’s fast, but not the fastest – could hold up very well with a large transfer.

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.

The NM1090 Pro lives up to our expectations that the drive would be more efficient than earlier drives. In this case, the drive is almost 40% more efficient than the MP700 Pro SE, a considerable boost. It’s not as efficient as drives with Micron’s newest TLC flash – that would be the P510 on this chart, as well as the 2TB T710, which uses the same controller as the NM1090 Pro. Having more flash on a 4TB SKU can lower power efficiency in many cases, but we know the SM2508 controller can achieve better results, particularly with the BiCS8 flash on the SN8100. Still, we’d say this is “efficient enough,” especially with the improvements to idle power consumption.

Temperature-wise, the NM1090 Pro uses multiple sensors that return different readings. Generally, you will have sensors to gauge at least the controller temperature and sometimes the NAND flash as well. A third reading could be more general for the PCB temperature, which could take DRAM into account, or it may just be an ambient reading. At peak, we saw 81°C, 74°C, and 78°C.

Our expectation is that the first is for the controller, and while that seems high, the ARM-based ASICs for consumer SSDs have a junction maximum around 125°C. However, other components have a narrower operation range, with consumer flash usually topping out around 75°, for instance. Flash can handle higher temperatures – we’ll avoid a deep discussion on how this impacts things – but this is given with consideration to the ambient. As a result, SSDs usually throttle based on a composite temperature, which in this case was probably the second number.

At 74°C, the NM1090 Pro only has about 10 degrees of headroom before throttling, so we would recommend a heatsink or other cooling solution. This is a double-sided drive with 4TB of flash, so it will run hotter. In a PCIe 4.0 slot, though, it should have no problems whatsoever. Our temperature monitoring comes from our sustained write test, which, to be fair, is realistic for usage on a high-end drive like this, but in normal use, this drive won’t overheat except in cases of high ambient temperatures.

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 NM1090 Pro Bottom Line

The Lexar NM1090 Pro performs in many ways exactly like the Acer Predator GM9000, which is not exactly surprising given that both drives have the same hardware. There are some differences, though, and we speculate they derive from the difference in capacity. We don’t hold this against the NM1090 Pro as we have not tested many 4TB high-end PCIe 5.0 drives yet, but time marches on: newer drives are being announced every day, and this drive isn’t quite as impressive as the GM9000 felt even a few months ago. With Phison E28 drives on the horizon, we have even more difficulty in giving the NM180 Pro a high score, even though, on the whole, it does just fine for its spot in the market.

That spot would be a “budget” high-end PCIe 5.0 drive that excels at higher capacities and a lower price point than the somewhat faster competition. Given its mediocre power efficiency by today’s standards, it remains difficult to recommend it as a primary drive, though. The Sandisk WD_Black SN8100, for one, is just a better drive. If you’re going for a full-fledged PCIe 5.0 drive as your main drive, why not spend a little more for the best? It could make sense as a budget option if you’re coming from PCIe 3.0 on a new build, but we still think it makes the most sense as a secondary game and data drive. In that it succeeds as it offers more than lower-end PCIe 5.0 drives, including venerable ones based on Phison’s E26 controller like the Corsair MP700 Pro SE. This is perfectly fine if you have a new system that can handle lots of fast storage.

It’s true that the NM800 Pro filled a similar role in some ways, using the less expensive InnoGrit IG5236 controller, which allowed it to butt heads with E18-based drives like the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G. However, in this case, the SM2508 is clearly superior to the E26 and the NM1090 Pro, instead lagging behind with its flash. This is a different sort of trade-off, particularly when we know what BiCS8 can do. You can get the raw sequential performance out of this drive, but it still feels half a generation behind in some ways. Given the expensive nature of drives in this class, this forces the drive into a semi-budget position, which, again, makes the performance gap an understandable and acceptable trade-off if you aren’t gunning for the very best.

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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.

The 8TB is still MIA but has a $949 MSRP. That's never going to sell considering the excellent 8TB WD Black SN850X is going for $649 bare, or $679 with a heatsink, and we've seen it fall below $600.

Lexar Play Software and Accessories

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.

Lexar Play: A Closer Look

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.

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.

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Comparison Products

The Lexar Play would have been, at one time, a welcome surprise. Now, however, there's a lot of competition. This includes Lexar’s own popular NM790, with the Addlink A93 not far behind with the same hardware. Patriot’s Viper VP4300 Lite also has this hardware but, at 4TB it has changed to QLC flash. There's also the Silicon Power US75, which we only tested at 2TB but it should match the NM790 and Play otherwise. Crucial’s 4TB release of the T500 — which notably has DRAM — makes this a much harder fight.

The rest of our lineup goes from the high-end with the PCIe 5.0 Crucial T700 to the lower end, QLC-based WD Blue SN5000. In the middle is one of our favorite 4TB drives, the Samsung 990 Pro, along with a smattering of Phison E18-based drives. The latter use older high-end PCIe 4.0 hardware, showing some age but having the benefit of DRAM. Similar drives include the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, the Seagate FireCuda 530, the Teamgroup T-Force Cardea A440 Pro Special Series, and the Netac NV7000.

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.

The Play is decidedly average in 3DMark, but that’s actually a good thing. It gets close to excellent drives like the 990 Pro. Among PCIe 4.0 drives, only the T500 really sets itself apart. In part that’s due to it having DRAM as well as having newer flash than the other DRAM-equipped drives, like the FireCuda 530.

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.

The Play is again in the middle of the pack, but it gets reasonably close to all drives aside from the 990 Pro, T500, and T700. The 990 Pro and T500 are the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs here.

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.

The Play would be an excellent choice for the PS5. It’s efficient, it runs cool, and the performance ballparks with other fast drives. The heatsink also matches the console nicely. You don’t need anything special for the PS5, though, so it really comes down to price. This drive would be especially interesting at 8TB, if and when that arrives, depending on the price tag.

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.

If you’re looking for fast transfers, the Play gets the job done. It’s not quite as fast as the T500, but it’ll match any other PCIe 4.0 SSD on the market.

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.

We first look at ATTO to search for any anomalies and to see how much data this drive can push at QD1 given various I/O block sizes. For the most part, the Play handles itself quite well. It outperforms similar drives — the NM790 and A93 — to a small degree over a range with writes, but drops a bit at 512 KiB with reads. This second bit might be a fluke, a difference in firmware, or a testing discrepancy, as the drive otherwise performs well.

We move to sequential performance, at QD1 and QD8, with CDM. The Play performs adequately here but it’s at the limit of the PCIe 4.0 interface with QD8. At QD1 with reads, we see the T500 pull away from the pack. The T500 is an exceptional drive with a DRAM boost, but pricing needs to be factored into the equation when comparing it against other drives like the Play.

Looking at random performance in CDM, with the biggest focus on random QD1 latencies, the Play is unfortunately merely average at best. That said, it beats the similar NM790 and A93, which is a positive result. This suggests the Play has had some firmware optimizations.

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 or more — two hours with a large 4TB drive like this — 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.

The 4TB Play writes at almost 5.8 GB/s for over 117 seconds. It writes a little bit faster for the first second or two, which is normal for drives with this controller. This behaves similarly to a small static cache but, as far as we know, the cache is entirely dynamic. This instead seems to be a feature of the controller to help burst-fire shorter writes. In any case, the cache is over 675GB, which is ample but not huge given the drive’s capacity.

This relatively small cache — a cache from this much TLC flash could be over twice this size — allows for a fast direct-to-TLC mode. In this mode the drive writes at over 2.5 GB/s. This is reflected in the steady state write performance chart. This matches what we’ve seen with the NM790 and A93 and is higher than many drives, like the FireCuda 530 and 990 Pro, that you might normally expect to be faster in this scenario.

Performance is high enough that, eventually, the drive can hit a folding state where writes are bottlenecked by the need to copy data from the pSLC cache to the native TLC flash. In that mode, the drive writes at just over 800 MB/s. This is relatively slow but far faster than QLC flash in a similar mode. Just look at the Viper VP4300 Lite. Even a relatively fast QLC-based drive like the SN5000 in a middle state cannot muster more than 500 MB/s or so.

When buying a 4TB drive, you’re buying for capacity, but being able to have consistent performance at a lower price — compared to high-end drives — is a nice bonus. The Play delivers that with its write performance.

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.

The Play is delightfully power-efficient, which we’re seeing more and more with newer drives. Well, not all new drives, as the T700 demonstrates, but improvements are on the way even at the high end with controllers like SMI’s SM2508. For now, drives like the Play can adequately serve in PS5s, desktops, and laptops — the last if the heatsink is removed — alike without overburdening the machine with power draw or thermal output. We only hit a maximum reported drive temperature of 54°C during testing, which is well below throttling.

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 Bottom Line

We’ve given a score of four out of five to drives with the same hardware as the Play in the past, but things have changed. We now have multiple drives with the same hardware, including the NM790, at competitive prices. We also have the excellent T500 and increasing amounts of drives based on Phison’s E27T controller. This puts more pressure on the Play, although it still has some advantages.

The primary advantage is its capacity range and specifically the 4TB and 8TB SKUs. 4TB is beyond the reach of many budget SSDs unless they use QLC flash, and 8TB is all but unheard of in this category. Unfortunately, the 8TB is missing in action and the 4TB is priced too high compared to the competition.

For 8TB, we can easily recommend the WD Black SN850X that's not only fast but has been relatively inexpensive for its capacity. At 4TB, the Samsung 990 Pro has been an excellent performer and has at times undercut the Play on price. At 2TB, great deals for drives like MSI’s M482 make the Play nothing more than an afterthought.

Suffice it to say, the Play isn’t going to get much play in the current SSD market with the original launch MSRPs, but things have already started to correct. We don't anticipate seeing the Play fall below the NM790 price, but it should come close — the differences in heatsink and firmware really don't amount to much in the way of cost.

Depending on retail prices, the drive is quite nice with an effective heatsink and halfway decent software support. In fact, it’s a great all-around drive. If Lexar can get the 8TB to market at a reasonable price, it could be especially popular. Unfortunately, we don’t have much hope for that.

If you happen to catch the 4TB Play on sale, you can feel comfortable picking it up, especially if you plan to toss it into your PS5. But at the time of review, there are better deals to be had, with similar 4TB drives starting closer to $200.

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Lexar has announced an 8TB model of its popular NM790 SSD series, doubling the maximum capacity of its previous offering. With the newest addition, the company caters to storage enthusiasts, gamers, and content creators who require ample storage volumes without compromising speed.

The drive is said to leverage a PCIe Gen 4x4 interface, offering sequential read speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s, write speeds of up to 6,200 MB/s, and random read speeds of up to 850,000 IOPs (input/output operations per second). This makes it slightly slower than the 4TB variant, which offers peak read/write transfers of 7,400 MB/s and 6,500 MB/s, respectively. The company also points out that the actual capacity is 8,192GB, slightly higher than most SSDs that offer 8,000GB.

We reviewed the 4TB variant of the NM790 last year and found it to be an excellent all-around performer, particularly in terms of sustained performance and efficiency.

Lexar's new 8TB variant of the NM790 is said to be ideal for video editing, 3D rendering, or large-scale gaming libraries where both capacity and speed are essential. The SSD’s design also makes it a great fit for console gamers, as it’s compatible with the PlayStation 5. With this upgrade, users can store more games while benefiting from speedy load times.

The drive achieves high levels of performance without the need for a DRAM cache. Instead, it uses advanced Dynamic SLC caching and Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology. HMB 3.0 technology allows the SSD to utilize system RAM instead of relying on its own memory, contributing to its high efficiency and lower power consumption. The NM790 is also claimed to consume up to 40% less power than competing Gen 4 SSDs with DRAM caches, making it an energy-efficient choice for both desktop and laptop users​.

Having a 5-year limited warranty and an endurance rating of 6,000 TBW (Terabytes written), the SSD also boasts a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 1.5 million hours, ensuring long-term reliability. As of now, there is no word on the official pricing, but we did manage to spot one selling in the UK for £770 (~$999). Remember UK consumer prices include 20% VAT, so U.S. retailer list prices could be nearer $800.

Lexar has taken the wraps off what it claims are the world’s first stainless-steel encased SD cards. Joining the firm’s Armor Series, which already contains products like rugged portable SSDs, the new memory cards boast “bend-resistance,” and are IP68 certified. Two new Armor Series SD cards have been revealed: the Armor Gold SD UHS-II, and Armor Silver Pro SD UHS-II cards.

The best SD cards are naturally quite durable, having no essential moving parts, and are able to survive quite careless handling in general. However, we can’t be the only ones to have seen cards where the case has started to crack open along the seams. If an SD card is mission-critical to you, then a good brand with a reinforced case and official IP rating might be worthwhile.

Lexar uses 316 stainless steel in the construction of the Armor Gold SD UHS-II and Armor Silver Pro SD UHS-II cards. We aren’t sure if they are unibody or constructed from two parts, however, Lexar boasts that these products are bend-resistant and they should be much stronger than common plastic-encased models. Lexar suggests the new Armor SD cards are “ideal for outdoor filming.”

The new cards should also better withstand water and dust ingress compared to most rivals. These storage products feature IP68 waterproofing and dustproofing certification. Hopefully, that will mean it is much less likely that some unwanted substance will enter the SD card shell to possibly corrode the PCB and components within - a data loss risk.

As for performance, we have only seen the numbers printed on the products – with read speeds of up to 280 MB/s on offer, for both Armor Gold and Silver Pro models. Lexar says the new cards feature next-gen PCIe 4.0 performance and are capable of “enabling seamless 8K RAW video shooting.”

If raw performance is the most important aspect of an SD card for you, though, you may be interested in the new Lexar Professional Gold Pro SDXC Express Card, also showcased at IFA (pictured above, right). This model delivers up to 1,700 MB/s data transfer speeds.

The new Lexar Armor Gold SD UHS-II and Armor Silver Pro SD UHS-II cards will be marketed in capacities of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. We don’t have retail availability and pricing information at this time.

The Lexar brand has a storied storage history, dating back to the mid-90s, but its keen to produce some of the best external SSDs here in 2024, and its two latest attempts on that front are a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 (20 Gbps) drives, the Professional SL600 and the more recent SL500.

These drives feel solid, and in many of our benchmarks they also perform well. But we had some odd performance issues with the SL500 in our Iometer sustained write testing. And both of these drives face stiff competition in performance and price from Lexar's former parent company, Micron, in the form of the Crucial X10 Pro.

For those who haven't been paying close attention to the Lexar brand in recent years, it was acquired by Micron (makers of Crucial memory and SSDs) in 2006, but eventually sold to Shenzhen-based Longsys. And since 2018 its current owners have been steadily pushing out storage products, from gaming RAM to internal SSDs to flash drives.

Specifications

Design and Accessories for the Lexar SL500 and Professional SL600

Lexar ships both the SL500 and Professional SL600 solely with a USB-C to USB-C cable. This makes sense, given that you basically need a USB-C port (of the rare 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 variety) to get anywhere close to the rated speed of these drives.

The Professional drive is bigger and thicker (0.42 inches), likely in part to aid in cooling, and because it has a large hook section at the top for clipping it onto your bag or whatever you want. It's a closed loop though, so you'll have to provide your own carabiner or hook.

The SL500 is smaller and slimmer, with tapered edges that are less than 0.2 inches thick. Both drives' shells are made of black metal that does a pretty decent job of attracting smudges from hand oils. But they don't attract dust and dirt the way the rubberized coatings of Samsung's competing drives do.

Neither of the Lexar drives are particularly big or bulky like LaCie's Rugged SSD Mini, and either should fit well in most pockets. But they're both considerably larger than Crucial's recent drives like the X9 and X10 Pro.

Regardless, it's not like any of these drives are going to take up much space in your on-the-go world. And at 43 grams for the SL500 and 64 grams for the SL600, you won't notice their weight, either. Samsung's T9 Pro weighs more than both of Lexar's drives put together, at 122 grams.

In terms of capacity, both Lexar drives are offered in 512GB, 1TB, and the 2TB capacities that we tested. Lexar tells us the SL500 will also be getting a 4TB option, but that capacity wasn't widely available when we wrote this.

Software of the Lexar LS500 and Professional SL600

Lexar ships these drives with its DataShield software. It prompts you to create a password for 256-bit software-based encryption. But beyond that, it's mostly a basic file explorer, with tools for changing your password, backing up and restoring data, and formatting the drive. The software looks good and performed flawlessly in my time using it. It just doesn't have many features.

Comparison Products

Our latest storage testbed is built around an MSI Z90 MEG ACE motherboard and an Intel Core i5-12600K CPU. This system gives us native Thunderbolt 4 ports and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 port via the front header (connected through Corsair's 5000D Airflow case).

As our test rig is still fairly new, we have limited comparisons, but they are growing as we test and review more drives. In the charts below, we've included a Sabrent Rocket Nano XTRM Thunderbolt 3 drive ($170 for our 1TB), which has more bandwidth (40Gb/s) at its disposal than the other drives.

To see how other 20 Gb/s USB drives compare, we've included Kingston's XS200 ($305 for the 4TB model we tested) and Crucial's X10 Pro ($197 when we wrote this), as well as a trio of lower-end 10Gb/s USB drives: Samsung's T7 Shield ($170, 2TB), Kingston's SX1000 ($106, 2TB), and Crucial's X9 Pro ($160, 2TB). Also included is one of our favorite recent budget drives, Silicon Power's PX10 ($140, 2TB). Lastly, for some perspective, we've also included one of the best flash drives we've tested, Kingston's DataTraveler Max (1TB, $90).

Our 2TB Lexar drives will face stiff competition, especially the SL500, with its MSRP of $229.99. We're already seeing that drive listed on Amazon for a bit under $200 though, which is more expensive than we're currently seeing the Professional SL600 sell for at B&H. Given what we'll see in testing, it's hard to recommend anyone pay more for the SL500 than the SL600. And both drives will face stiff competition from the $197 2TB Crucial X10 Pro. That drive has also previously been on sale for significantly less.

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.

Among the drives we've run through our new testbed, the higher-bandwidth Sabrent still holds the top spot on this test. But the Lexar drives land in between LaCie's Rugged Mini ($190). This is a good first showing for Lexar's drives, but Crucial's X10 Pro is just behind the Professional SL600.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Once again, Lexar's drives land near the top, with the SL500 this time a slot behind the LaCie, and the X10 Pro sandwiched between the SL500 and SL600 drives. Note also that the Lexar and Crucial X10 Pro drives beat the LaCie when it comes to writes.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

On this sequential test, the Professional SL600 finally pulls ahead of its consumer-focused SL500 sibling. And the SL500 is no slouch, besting Samsung's T9 on reads, and easily beating out Crucial's X10 Pro in both reads and writes.

When it comes to IOPS, we see the familiar grouping of both Lexar drives landing behind the LaCie, and sandwiching Crucial's X10 Pro. That's just looking at random reads, though. When it comes to random writes, both Lexar drives do better than the Crucial, though as in most other tests so far, all three are fairly close to one another.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

In this, the most grueling of our storage benchmarks, Lexar's SL500 shows its limitations. For about a minute and a half, it writes at an impressive speed of just under 1,800 MB/s, then drops down to just above 1400, then drops much lower, to 1,200 and then below 800 MB/s, before recovering back to the 1,200 MB/s and falling back below 800, then repeating that pattern for the rest of our test.

It's worth pointing out you may never see this behavior when using the SL500, unless you write very quickly to the drive for more than three minutes. And the SL500 isn't marketed as a professional drive, so we wouldn't expect it to write at top speeds for prolonged periods.

Lexar's Professional SL600, meanwhile, looks quite a bit better here, though it still suffers a drop. It writes at just under 1,800 MB/s for, again, about 90 seconds, before dropping to the mid-1,400s, where it stays for the duration of our test. This is a solid showing, and worthy of its pro-class name.

But note that Crucial's X10 Pro was able to maintain its write speed in the mid-1,700s for roughly 11 minutes before it finally fell into the 1,400 range for the rest of our test. That makes the Crucial drive a better bet for tasks that involve frequent massive writes, like filling the drive with uncompressed video footage. It doesn't hurt that it's much smaller than the Professional SL600, and costs less.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Intel 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.

Conclusion

 If you aren't going to often be filling up and emptying your SSD, Lexar's SL500 will likely serve you well enough. It landed near the top of our charts in most of our tests. But the behavior we saw in our Iometer testing makes it hard to recommend when priced near $200, given the many other USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 drives on the market, many of which cost less.

The Lexar Professional SL600 is a more reliable performer, and it held up well where the SL500 fell, in our sustained write test. That said, it wasn't the best performer we've seen on that front, which is a problem when Crucial's X10 Plus performed better on the same test. Crucial's drive is about half the physical size of the SL600 and costs about $13 more as of this writing, though it's hovered in the $180 range for most of 2024. If you are after a fast 20 Gbps USB drive for professional tasks, the Professional SL600 is worth considering if you find it on sale. But if the Crucial X10 Pro is selling for the same price or even slightly more, that's still the drive we'd choose in this category. 

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Lexar has been surprising us lately with some really interesting products, beginning with the excellent Lexar NM790. Now Lexar is getting into the portables game with the M.2 2230 Lexar Play SSD. Shorter drives like this are perfect for portable gaming devices, some laptops, and other select devices, with the drawback of having to fit a lot of performance into a small package. Such a drive has to be single-sided and optimized for maximum power efficiency. While Lexar surprised with YMTC TLC flash on the NM790, the Play is using the more common Micron TLC flash but with a controller we have not yet reviewed in this form factor or with TLC flash.

Lexar is playing it safe by only offering this drive at the popular 1TB capacity point. This makes it good for PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 host devices alike, and it can be extended to M.2 2242 for the Lenovo Legion Go and other such hosts. At one time there weren’t a lot of options here, but the Lexar Play now enters a crowded marketplace. Luckily, its performance is good and the price is right. This doesn’t always make it the best choice, especially with better drives on the horizon, but it’s a good option that's currently available. If you want TLC flash at 2TB, however, the only current options are the WD SN740 or WD Black SN770M.

Lexar was formerly part of the Micron family, but it was split off and sold to Longsys back in 2017. Things were quiet for a time, but Longsys now appears to be making a more concerted effort to use the Lexar brand for a variety of gaming PC SSDs.

Lexar Play Specifications

The Lexar Play SSD currently sells for $84.99, and it's only available at 1TB. This is the same price as the Corsair MP600 Mini and slightly less expensive than the Inland TN446, two prominent rivals. The Play is rated for up to 5,200 / 4,700 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 800K random read and write IOPS. That's comparable to other drives in its class. The Lexar Play also has a standard 5-year, 600TBW warranty.

Lexar Play Software and Accessories

Lexar currently does not have any software available for download for its Lexar Play SSD. Previously, Lexar did offer its SSD Dash toolbox, and DataShield for encryption on some drives. We recommend using CrystalDiskInfo and free imaging/cloning software of your choice.

Lexar Play — A Closer Look

The Lexar Play is packaged simply, though it does include an M.2 screw. In most cases the intended host device will have an M.2 screw, but having an extra is a good thing. The drive is single-sided, which is necessary for installation into many devices that use this form factor, like the Steam Deck.

The Lexar Play uses SMI’s SM2269XT controller, which is also used in the Adata Atom 50, Adata Legend 850 and 850 Lite, OEM Micron 2400, and the Solidigm P41 Plus. Of these, only the Micron 2400 is also available in the M.2 2230 form factor. The 2400 uses the XTG version of the controller, which is larger at 9.9x11 mm, while the Play’s XTF measures 7.7x11 mm. That makes it a bit smaller in surface area than the common Phison E21T controller, which is 7.5x12 mm. The 2400 has more controller surface area than both to help dissipate heat.

While the E21T has a single primary ARM Cortex-R5 core running at around 1 GHz with a dual-core CoXProcessor, which is also R5 running at a lower clock for efficiency, the SM2269XT is a dual-core R8 design that runs at up to 650 MHz. The R8 has some advantages and also can improve performance by 50% or more per MHz, which means the SM2269XT can match the E21T at a lower clock. However, the R8 tends to be less efficient, so with the same flash we would expect the Lexar Play to pull more power. This can indirectly create more heat, but if the drives are restricted to PCIe 3.0 speeds — as is the case with the Steam Deck — then this is less of a factor.

The two controllers are otherwise similar, but the SM2269XT has superior 4K LDPC to the E21T’s 2K. In practice this doesn't mean much, but it can improve read performance, such as in the case of 4KB random read latency, as error correction is more robust with 4K LDPC. Phison’s newer controllers, which include the E27T that will be used on drives available in the 2230 form factor, also use 4K LDPC. ECC is critical for getting more endurance out of flash as time goes on.

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Lexar Play Comparison Products

The Lexar Play SSD’s most direct rivals are the Inland TN446, Sabrent Rocket 4 2230, and Corsair MP600 Mini. All four drives use the same TLC flash, but the Play has a different controller. The other TLC-based contenders are the Inland TN436, which represents older and OEM 2230 SSDs, and the WD Black SN770M, a popular choice as it — and its OEM brother, the WD SN740 — can bring 2TB of TLC in this form factor.

The other SSDs, whether at 1TB or 2TB, are QLC-based. These include the Addlink S91, Corsair MP600 Core Mini, Inland QN446, Sabrent Rocket Q4 2230, and Teamgroup MP44S. QLC flash makes the most sense at 2TB, due to limited options at that capacity, but can help you save some money at 1TB as the performance gap is smaller in a PCIe 3.0 device like the Steam Deck.

All of our performance charts below include both PCIe 4.0 results (the default for our testing) and PCIe 3.0 results — the latter shows (2230 Gen3) in the names of the SSDs.

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 include details of that where possible.

The Lexar Play has exceptional 3DMark performance, effectively matching the WD Black SN770M, which is the fastest M.2 2230 SSD that we’ve tested to date. The SN770M, or the equivalent SN740, are particularly popular because they have TLC flash at up to 2TB in this diminutive form factor. That’s not possible with the flash used on the Play and the other TLC-based drives we have reviewed as denser flash is required.

The SN770M is also popular for its high performance, and it looks like the Play can reach that level. Given that the SN770M and SN740 have the drawbacks of higher power consumption and heat production, this makes the Play an interesting alternative at 1TB.

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.

PCMark 10 performance usually follows the 3DMark results. The Play is again near the top of the charts, matched or beaten only by the SN770M and SN740. Performance is significantly better than the PCIe 3.0 TN436, regardless of PCIe mode. The Play’s gap is also larger over the competing drives in PCIe 4.0 mode, which might make it a better fit for the ASUS ROG Ally and similar systems.

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.

The Play’s transfer performance is more lackluster than what we might expect from the 3DMark and PCMark 10 results. It’s fast enough, but it’s not particularly compelling. This should not be an issue if it’s the only drive in a device. The SN770M is the fastest drive when the drives are limited to PCIe 3.0 mode. The Lexar Play falls to the bottom of the DiskBench results in PCIe 3.0 mode, though to be fair, the gap between the fastest and slowest drives isn't particularly large.

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.

The Play’s read performance in ATTO is a bit erratic, which must be due to how the SM2269XT controller interacts with the flash. A nice bump at 64KiB could be from a full-die spread, given that this flash is four-plane with a 16KiB page per plane. Performance is best when all four channels can work in tandem, presumably at 256KiB and up. This pattern is not demonstrated with writes or in CDM’s sequential read results. The Play opens up in CDM writes when it’s in PCIe 4.0 mode as compared to the QLC-based drives, as expected.

The bad news is that the Play does exhibit middling 4KB QD1 random write latency. QLC flash can actually be faster here due to architectural differences. The good news is that the more important 4KB QD1 random read latency result is excellent for the Play. We already know what this flash can do on other drives — the MP600 Mini, Rocket 4 2230, and TN446 on this list — so further improvements may come from the controller. SMI’s controllers historically have had good performance in this area. This makes a good case for the Play being one of the best 1TB TLC-based options, especially in PCIe 4.0 mode.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash.

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. We also collect temperature data during this write saturation testing.

When unhindered by a PCIe 3.0 interface, the Lexar Play writes in pSLC mode at up to 4.74 GB/s for just over 64 seconds. This suggests a fairly large cache, over 300GB, but not so large that the drive has to immediately resort to folding. Instead, the drive enters a direct-to-TLC write mode at 1.9 GB/s. Eventually it does have to fold, though, writing at below 900 MB/s. It has the ability to recover, which gives it a steady state write performance equivalent to the Rocket 4 2230 and MP600 Mini, which have the same flash. As it stands now, this is as good as it gets for 1TB and M.2 2230.

Is a large cache a good fit for the devices the Play will be going into? With this flash, it probably is. With QLC, not so much, as steady state performance can bog down to 100 MB/s. This isn’t a common or intended state, but the steady state demonstrates a worst-case scenario for a full and overloaded drive. The Play can hang with the best at 1TB, although a more conservative cache might be preferred at times. Upcoming E27T-based drives in this form factor will probably have smaller caches but also lower TLC speeds with SK hynix’s TLC flash, if the Corsair MP600 Elite is anything to go by.

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 21-22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.

The Lexar Play is reasonably efficient, about as efficient as the QLC-based drives on the list. This makes it less efficient than drives using Phison’s E21T controller with the same TLC flash — that would be the Rocket 4 2230, MP600 Mini, and TN446 — but more efficient than the SN770M and the older TN436. This applies in both PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 modes. It’s efficient enough that it’s a perfectly suitable alternative for other TLC-based M.2 2230 SSDs at 1TB and certainly better than last-gen OEM drives.

In PCIe 4.0 mode, the Play hit a maximum of about 76°C. In PCIe 3.0 mode, maximum thermals reached 71C. This compares to the SMART throttling thresholds of 86°C and 93°C, respectively. The first threshold acts as a warning to start throttling while the latter is a critical state where reducing temperature must be done at all cost, and can lead to thermal shutdown in some cases. This means the Play still had 10°C to go before any real throttling, which with our workloads is an indication of sufficient thermal performance. The temperature is higher than with drives like the Rocket 4 2230, but also lower than the SN770M.

Steam Deck Testing — General

To gauge general Steam Deck performance we engage in a variety of typical storage situations with active time measurement. These activities include dealing with the default SteamOS through initial setup, re-imaging, initial booting, and booting in general. For game testing we see how long it takes to install and boot the popular title Hollow Knight. For a full explanation of our testing procedure, see our Steam Deck SSD article.

The Lexar Play performed well in all of our standard Steam Deck tests, without exhibiting any anomalous behavior. Its boot performance is on par with the SN740, which is the fastest booting drive we’ve tested. A second here or there probably isn’t enough to recommend one drive over another, so take all factors together when considering which drive to buy.

All the Steam Deck testing has been done over the course of months, with each drive re-imaged using the same original data, but then the SteamOS updates use the latest version available at the time of testing. That could account for a few additional seconds here or there in our results, so again, small differences aren't likely to matter much.

Steam Deck Testing — KDiskMark and Temperature

One of the most popular storage benchmarks is CrystalDiskMark (CDM), which we use in our own Windows-based SSD testing suite. This benchmark relies on Microsoft’s DiskSpd with templated test settings. CDM lets you quickly see how a drive performs against its idealized, rated specifications and the benchmark can also hint at a more “real world” feel with low queue depth I/O testing.

The Linux flavor of this benchmark, which is easy to install on the Steam Deck, is KDiskMark. The “K” refers to the KDE desktop environment used on the Deck. KDiskMark relies on the Flexible I/O tester, or FIO, instead of DiskSpd. For the temperature portion we use data from the SMART sensors on the drive which can be directly polled and from which the maximum temperature can be extracted.

The Lexar Play has very good random read performance, matching our CDM results above, but relatively weak random write performance. The former tends to be more important in terms of user experience. Sequential performance at QD1, which is a typical workload, is quite good, but keep in mind this is in the Steam Deck, which is a PCIe 3.0 device. PCIe 4.0 devices will react differently, so use our CDM results to gauge instead.

The Lexar Play ran surprisingly cool in our Steam Deck, within range of some of the better drives and clearly better than the SN740 and older TN436. The Steam Deck is, again, a 3.0 device, and 4.0 drives will run cooler at lower interface speeds. Our testing is also not quite so strenuous as the write saturation tests on desktop, which also plays a role, but normal use in the Steam Deck is likely to be much closer to these results. In our desktop testing above the Play was 5°C or more cooler in the 3.0 mode, so it’s no surprise it’s quite comfortable in the Steam Deck.

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 1TB: The bottom line

The Lexar Play is challenging to judge as it enters a crowded market, one that used to be the opposite, with performance numbers that are good and often great but not above existing options when taken on the whole. PCIe 3.0 host devices, the primary one being the Steam Deck, can still benefit from the Play’s excellent 4KB random read latency, but otherwise QLC flash is satisfactory at 1TB and especially 2TB. If it comes down to saving every penny, you wouldn’t miss TLC flash unless you nearly completely fill the drive. There’s a wider gulf with PCIe 4.0 devices such as the Asus ROG Ally, in which case a TLC-based drive is optimal at 1TB and below.

Many portable devices that take M.2 2230 drives, or 2230 that can be extended to 2242, have stock options at 512GB or up. TLC flash is worthwhile over QLC flash at 512GB, but if you’re upgrading a stock drive you are probably angling for more space. The Lexar Play is (currently, at least) only available in a 1TB capacity, so that fits it into a narrow range alongside the MP600 Mini, which is also only available at 1TB. These two drives are comparable, with the Play maybe feeling a tiny bit more responsive in some cases such as with SteamOS booting. The Inland TN446 and Sabrent Rocket 4 2230 are also good choices here. However, M.2 2242 host devices may have more options in the future as more 2242 SSDs are released.

If you’re looking for 2TB and TLC in 2230, then the conversation has already ended. WD’s SN740 and Black SN770M are the two options on the table. However, drives based on Phison’s newer E27T controller will come to rival it with likely better performance and power efficiency. These drives at 1TB should be superior to the Play and other drives currently on the market as well. They can also be extended to 2242 for hosts that support that form factor. In other words, waiting is a viable option.

The Lexar Play is an interesting alternative in this growing market of shorter drives, which is great for everyone. We expect this market to grow even wider over time. The Play is priced right where it should be, and would be an excellent alternative to any of the other 1TB TLC-based SSDs currently available. Its power efficiency is within a good range and its performance characteristics make it snappy where it matters. It’s short and sweet, targeting a popular capacity — using a different controller — without incurring any serious drawbacks. We can recommend it.

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Lexar unveiled new portable SSDs at CES 2024 — the SL500, Professional SL600, and the SL660 Blaze — with up to 2,000 MB/s read & write speeds. All three portable SSDs are purpose-built and have multiple storage variants.

The SL500 and the Armor 700 for video recording

The SL500 Ultra Slim delivers up to 2,000 MB/s read and 1,800 write transfer speeds with 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB options. This drive is useful for devices like the iPhone 15 Pro, which uses the ProRes RAW format for videos. Apple allows recording to an external drive, making portable SSDs like the SL500 perfect for this application. A MagSafe add-on, which will be sold separately, can help the drive stay where it needs to be. 

The Armor 700 is the new iteration of the Lexar Armor series drives. As the name suggests, the Armor 700 has a rugged design for added durability. It has an IP66 rating (the IP65 labeling on Lexar's presentation isn't up to date) that's not seen with any other rugged drives, providing a higher level of protection against dust, liquid, and drops. This drive is advertised to provide up to 2,000 MBs in both read and write speeds, giving plenty of throughput ability to use as an external source to record 4K 60fps videos from any device. This resolution and refresh rate in RAW format consumes a lot of space and requires high write speeds. Since iPhones don't have MicroSD expandability, high-performing portable SSDs fill the gap. 

The Lexar SL500 and the Armor 700 use Silicon Motion's controller with a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface.

The SL600 for the masses and the SL660 Blaze for gaming

The Professional SL600 is a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drive with 256-bit AES encryption and no RGB. It is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. 

The SL660 Blaze has 512GB and 1TB storage variants with RGB LEDs aimed at gamers. External storage is just as important for various other types of users as many handheld gaming devices do not have provisions to use a MicroSD card. 

Pricing is not confirmed, but the drives will be available at retail during Q1 2024. Some of these portable SSDs are already listed on Lexar's website, so it is just a matter of time before its release. 

Kingston, the world's No. 1 supplier of retail memory modules and storage devices, has formed a joint venture with Longsys Electronics to operate in China. The move will combine the strengths of Kingston and Longsys, and lower risks for the former. In addition, the partnership will better address the Chinese retail memory market and avoid any potential problems caused by the U.S.-China tensions. 

Under the terms of the deal, Kingston will hold a 49% stake in the joint venture, whereas Longsys will own the majority with a 51% stake. The joint venture will function as an independent entity with full corporate governance and management capabilities. Its focus will be on offering 'diverse and high-end embedded storage solutions' to customers in mainland China. The joint venture will handle its own product planning, R&D management, supply chain management, and sales. Meanwhile, Longsys will conduct R&D and technical support, whereas Kingston will be responsible for core resource procurement and branding.

By forming a joint venture with a Chinese company, Kingston opens its doors to work with virtually any entity in China that needs embedded storage. Given how keen the U.S. government is to place China-based companies in its Entity List, Kingston saves time and effort by not directly working with certain China-based customers and partnering with a local company to handle these clients. 

Kingston is the world's No. 1 supplier of branded memory modules and solid-state drives. Its lineup also has plenty of embedded storage and memory products, though it is hard to say how successful the company is in this territory.

This joint venture is a response to the ongoing political and business tensions between the U.S. and China. DigiTimes says this represents a bigger trend where American tech companies are teaming up with local firms to stay strong in China. This partnership could also be great news for the supply chain, with companies like Phison Electronic, which works with Longsys, likely to benefit from the deal.

Lexar's latest Ares RGB DDR5-6000 C34 memory kit has all the looks of a strong competitor, but can it trade blows with the best RAM on the market? Lexar ventured into the memory market in 2021. It was a subtle entrance, though, with run-of-the-mill DDR4-2666. However, Lexar has been working hard to build a memory portfolio. The brand currently has three series of memory products (Ares, Hades, and Thor) and has made the best of them. In the interim, Lexar offers DDR5 under the Ares series with minimal options. The only available capacity is 32GB (2x16GB), but the data rates arrive in DDR5-5600, DDR5-6000, or DDR5-6400.

The Ares RGB memory module sports an aluminum heat spreader with either a dark grey or white color. There's some marketing emblazoned on them, but the design looks good regardless. The memory modules are 43.3mm (1.7 inches) in height, so we don't expect them to interfere with your air CPU cooler. However, it doesn't hurt to double-check if you own a massive cooler that towers over the memory slots on your motherboard.

Lexar placed a translucent light bar on top of the Ares RGB memory modules. There is ample compatibility with motherboard lighting systems, including Asus Aura Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion 2.0, MSI Mystic Light Sync, and ASRock Polychrome. The company also provides the proprietary Lexa RGB Sync software for custom personalization.

Each DDR5 memory module features a single-rank design with a density of 16GB. The memory module comprises eight SK hynix H5CG48MEBDX014 (M-die) integrated circuits (ICs), each 2GB. The power management IC (PMIC) has the 5100 X52A14 part number and belongs to Global Mixed-mode Technology (GMT). Established in 1996, GMT specializes in power solutions, including PMICs. Oddly, we hadn't seen a vendor use a GMT PMIC until now.

The default setting for the memory kit is DDR5-4800 with 40-39-39-77 timings. Lexar embedded one XMP 3.0 and one AMD EXPO profile for DDR5-6000 into each Ares memory module. Regardless of the vendor, the memory operates at 34-38-38-76 timings with a 1.3V DRAM voltage. See our PC Memory 101 feature and How to Shop for RAM story for more timings and frequency considerations.

Comparison Hardware

Our Intel test system runs the Core i9-13900K on the MSI MEG Z690 Unify-X with the 7D28vAA firmware. In contrast, our AMD system pairs the Ryzen 7 7700X with the MSI MPG X670E Carbon WiFi changed to the 7D70v176 firmware. The Corsair CUE H100i Elite LCD liquid cooler keeps our Raptor Lake and Zen 4 processor operating temperatures under check.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Gaming X Trio tackles the more graphics-intensive workloads, ensuring that there isn't a graphics bottleneck in our gaming RAM benchmarks. The Windows 11 installation, benchmarking software, and games reside on Crucial's MX500 SSDs. Meanwhile, the Corsair RM1000x Shift ATX 3.0 power supply provides our systems with clean and abundant power, directly feeding the GeForce RTX 4080 with a native 16-pin (12VHPWR) power cable. Lastly, the Streacom BC1 open-air test bench is vital to organizing our hardware.

Intel Performance

Overall, the Ares memory kit ended in the middle of the pack on the Intel test platform. It had some good showings in a few benchmarks, including Cinebench R23 and LuxMark, where the memory kit finished first. Cumulative gaming performance was similar to application performance.

AMD Performance

Regarding application performance, the Ares memory kit dropped to the bottom of the stack on the AMD platform. It didn't have any noteworthy performances. As for gaming, the memory once again finished in the middle of the competition.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

Our expectations were high because the Ares memory kit uses SK hynix M-die ICs, and Lexar's memory didn't disappoint us. It was one of three DDR5-6000 memory kits that could hit DDR5-6600. As for our settings, we configured the timings to 34-40-40-76 timings. We had to moderately relax the tRCD and tRP values and increase the DRAM voltage to 1.4V.

Lowest Stable Timings

The Ares' out-of-the-box performance isn't strong, but you can remedy it if you're into tweaking. At DDR5-6000, however, the Ares memory kit ran fine with a CAS Latency (CL) of 30 cycles. There were some tweaking margins for the tRCD and tRP timings too. We used a similar 1.4V DRAM voltage as the overclocking test.

Bottom Line

The Ares RGB DDR5-6000 C34 is a bag of surprises regarding performance. The memory kit offers better performance on Intel platforms despite coming with XMP 3.0 and AMD EXPO profiles. Perhaps the only good news is that the performance delta between Ares and its competitors isn’t meaningful for the majority. But if you’re the type after the highest-performing memory kit, the Ares isn’t it.

Lexar prices the memory kit at $99.99. It’s not a bad price, but it isn't the cheapest DDR5-6000 memory kit. Entry-level DDR5-6000 starts at $75 but has worse timings than Lexar’s memory kit. The Ares RGB DDR5-6000 C34’s timings are decent for the price. In the current market, sub-$100 performance DDR5-6000 memory kits are hard to come by, so there’s some appeal for the Ares RGB DDR5-6000 C34, especially if Lexar can lower the pricing to make it more competitive.

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The Adata Legend 960 Max is another common PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD for your PS5 or desktop PC, with the added advantage of a heatsink to keep things cool. Overall, it’s a Legend 960 in disguise, simply with an added heatsink, but this works well with the drive’s chemistry. Although it sets no real records, the ability to write for a long time while keeping cool could make this drive interesting for some uses. However, it faces stiff competition, so it has to be priced right to be meaningful.

Specifications

The Adata Legend 960 Max, as with the original Legend 960, comes in 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB flavors. During the time of review the prices dropped on these to $84.99, $169.99, and $369.99, respectively. This pricing feels a bit high at 1TB with heatsinked drives like the Lexar Professional NM800 Pro around and there’s fair competition at 2TB, too. At 4TB the Legend 960 Max is reasonable for a high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD if you want a svelte heatsink, possibly for PlayStation 5 use, but the WD Black SN850X is otherwise attractive.

The Legend 960 Max reaches up to 7,400 MBps / 6,800 MBps for sequential reads and writes and up to 750,000 / 630,000 IOPS for random reads and rights. TBW is at 780TB per TB of capacity and the drive is backed by a five-year warranty.

Software and Accessories

Adata provides a download for its SSD Toolbox software package. This application has drive information, diagnostics, cloning, TRIM optimization, a firmware updater, and the ability to perform a secure erase.

A Closer Look

The Legend 960 Max is quite similar to the original Legend 960 with the primary change being the addition of a full-fledged heatsink. This is a nice addition as the original drive could get quite hot during sustained workloads. It’s possible to add your own heatsink or to use a motherboard heatsink on the original, although currently these drives are priced similarly. What we spot otherwise is a double-sided drive with one DRAM and two NAND packages on either side, with the controller centralized on the top side.

 The Legend 960 Max uses the same controller and DDR4 as the Legend 960. There’s plenty of DRAM and the controller has proven itself capable, but not exceptional. SMI was a little late to the market this time around.

The flash is Micron’s ubiquitous 176-Layer TLC, or B47R. In time we expect Micron’s 232-Layer design to become more common, particularly on higher-end drives. This includes a range of upcoming PCIe 5.0 SSDs. That flash has twice the typical density of B47R, which promises to help kick capacity up a notch.

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Comparison Products

The 2TB Adata Legend 960 Max is up against some of the best drives we’ve tested. Our comparison list includes the Samsung 990 Pro, the Solidigm P44 Pro, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, the Adata Legend 960, the Acer Predator GM7000, the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX, the Sabrent Rocket 4.0, and the Gigabyte Aorus 7000s. The Rocket 4.0 is the odd one out here, being from the original crop of PCIe 4.0 SSDs designed for the X570 launch. The Aorus 7000s is using a fully-fledged 4.0 controller but was from the time of older Micron flash.

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.

The Legend 960 Max is average in 3DMark and, as anticipated, the same as the original 960. This is “good enough” performance but suggests this drive must be cheaper than better offerings like the P44 Pro.

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 Legend 96 Max does pretty well in PCMark 10, average to above average, but still can’t catch the P44 Pro or 990 Pro. SMI controllers and Micron’s flash have provided a good general user experience in the past, so this is plenty fast for daily use.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The Legend 960 max copies sufficiently fast, like other high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs, but does not stand out with reads or writes.

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.

The Legend 960 Max has good ATTO sequential write results, but some improvement would be nice for reads. This could be a factor of the controller with certain block sizes. At 1MB for CDM, things look fine. Random 4KB latency is a bit disappointing as this was an area SMI controllers used to shine. InnoGrit and Phison alternatives simply get more out of this flash.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 

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.

The 2TB Legend 960 Max manages almost 6.5 GBps for over 30 seconds which a sufficiently large cache of 200GB. The TLC mode is pleasing at up to 3.6 GBps, and even folding is reasonable at nearly 1.3 GBps. Recovery to TLC is relatively rapid and its performance is sufficient for some sustained workloads.

As with the original Legend 960, this makes the drive useful for certain workloads while having a cache that’s large enough to handle bursty, random writes. The addition of a heatsink on the Max makes this drive even better as it could work well as a caching drive without suffering from the detrimental aspects of heat.

Power Consumption

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 storage.

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 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.

Combined with the above results for write saturation, the Legend 960 Max would be even better if it had good power efficiency under load. Unfortunately, it is not exceptional here, although certainly good enough even for that sort of workload.

The original Legend 960 did not throttle even after 1TB of writes, so the situation just gets better with the Max. In warmer environments and under heavier workloads, the Max is able to maintain consistent performance. This could include in a PS5, since that can get surprisingly warm, or other devices with limited airflow.

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.

Bottom Line

The Adata Legend 960 Max is an ordinary PCIe 4.0 SSD that can offer relatively high levels of performance but does not impress against other options that have been on the market longer. If priced right, it’s a fine alternative for a PS5 or desktop SSD, but otherwise it struggles to stand out in a crowded market. It does have good sustained performance, but this only matches what other controllers with the same flash can do if also designed around a small pSLC cache.

The drive is essentially the regular Legend 960 with a heatsink instead of a headspreader. That’s a good thing as even though the original 960 ran relatively cool, a heatsink makes this very cool-running. Coupled with its potential for sustained writes, this drive could be useful for certain workloads or applications, but again it would have to be cheaper than drives with rival controllers and similar performance characteristics. It’s a nice option to have on the market, but this drive does little to stand out. 

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The Lexar Professional NM800 Pro is a high-end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs that enters a crowded market but can set itself apart with its high efficiency and low temperatures. This drive is best caught on sale and particularly at 2TB, where it would be great for the PlayStation 5 or a gaming desktop. It sets no new performance records and has some inconsistent performance results, which keep it off the best PS5 SSDs and best SSDs overall lists, but on the whole it performs well enough to get the job done. With PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the horizon, this drive may best be suited to adding extra fast storage to your system.

SSD prices have been dropping fast for a while now so it’s important to score the right deal. This drive should be included in your list if the above characteristics fit your criteria. Another drive in this class that’s been priced low in recent sales is the Crucial P5 Plus, but the NM800 Pro is the superior choice as it generally performs better and comes with a stylish heatsink. The non-heatsinked version should be okay in a laptop if you really want full PCIe 4.0 bandwidth.

On the other hand, there are many drives faster than the NM800 Pro, even if the performance gap can be difficult to subjectively feel in the day-to-day. Our recommendation is to put this drive in your PS5 or as a secondary PC drive when it’s priced right, particularly at 2TB. The NM800 Pro does not really stand out in any other way.

The Lexar Professional NM800 Pro is available in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB. The prices at the time of review are $69.99, $83.49, and $129.99, respectively. This pricing is competitive at 1TB and especially 2TB, but the market has been volatile. This is a drive that you might have to catch on sale, regardless of capacity.

The NM800 Pro can push PCIe 4.0 bandwidth at up to 7500/6500 MBps and 1300K/1200K IOPS for sequential/random reads and writes, respectively. Lexar warranties this drive for five years and 1PB of writes per TB capacity. This endurance rating is more than the industry average, although that is generally not a significant factor.

Software and Accessories for Lexar Professional NM800 Pro

Lexar does not offer any special downloads or accessories for this drive, beyond the optional heatsink variant. We recommend Clonezilla or similar for imaging/cloning and CrystalDiskInfo for general health analysis.

A Closer Look at Lexar Professional NM800 Pro

Our sample arrived with a heatsink, which is a nice addition. Some competing drives lack a heatsink which is beginning to be an issue with high-end drives that can experience thermal throttling without one. Lexar also sells a version of this drive without a heatsink. Either one would work fine for PlayStation 5 use. Underneath the heatsink, the drive is essentially identical to the non-heatsinked version.

Beneath the label, we spot a controller, a DRAM package, and two NAND packages. Even at 2TB this drive manages to be single-sided which is particularly challenging at this capacity. This makes it an option for certain tricky builds, including some laptops and HTPCs.

The controller is the InnoGrit IG5236, a popular 8-channel design that’s used for high-end PCIe 4.0 drives. Usually these drives are cheaper than competing SSDs built around Phison’s E18 or proprietary solutions. In the future it will have to tackle faster, 4-channel controllers that can max out the interface, such as the Maxio MAP1602 found on the Acer Predator GM7. Some other examples include the TenaFe TC2201 and SMI SM2268XT. These controllers are DRAM-less with fewer, faster channels, which makes them particularly competitive on price and for application in laptops.

The DRAM is labeled FLXC2002G-N2, which is LPDDR4X. This is extremely efficient DRAM, which should allow the NM800 Pro to run more efficiently as a whole, although DRAM is just one component. This will also help a little with thermal management, with or without a heatsink. This is 2GB of DRAM, which is an excellent amount for 2TB of flash.

The NM800 Pro uses Micron’s 176-Layer TLC, or B47R. This flash is typically sold with 64GB dies which implies each 1TB NAND package contains 16 dies in a HDP or 16DP configuration. This is usually the most amount of dies one can reasonably stack per package.

Lexar has the option of swapping to other flash, such as the efficient YMTC TLC found on the Predator GM7, but reports are that the IG5236 SSD controller has firmware issues with YMTC flash. The efficiency of that flash would be a nice fit on this drive and it seems other flash manufacturers have taken notice of the possible advantages found with such a design.

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Comparison Products

We are putting the 2TB Lexar Professional NM800 Pro against some of the best drives we’ve reviewed, all high-end PCIe 4.0 options. This list includes the HP FX900 Pro, the Adata Legend 960, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, the Solidigm P44 Pro, the Samsung 990 Pro, the WD Black SN850X, and the Acer Predator GM7000. The NM800 Pro is most similar to the FX900 Pro and Predator GM7000, which use the same controller and flash. Historically this combination performs well and can undercut the competition on price by a small amount. Phison, for its part on drives such as the Rocket 4 Plus-G, offers more flexibility to the manufacturer.

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.

The NM800 Pro finishes dead last in 3DMark. It should perform at least on the level of the FX900 Pro and GM7000, but instead it falls short. This begins a pattern of sometimes inconsistent performance on this drive, possibly driven by firmware tuning.

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 picture looks a bit better in PCMark 10 as the NM800 Pro gets a middle-of-the-pack score. This is certainly good enough.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The NM800 Pro performs as expected in DiskBench, matching the FX900 Pro and GM7000. This is below other high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs but is sufficiently fast.

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.

The NM800 Pro shows weak performance with sequential reads in both ATTO and CDM, matching the pattern of the FX900 Pro. This appears to be a facet of InnoGrit controllers, including the IG5220 which is used on the HP FX900. Sequential writes are satisfactory. Random performance in CDM is solid for reads, an important benchmark, but unusually poor for writes. This is more of the NM800 pro’s inconsistency.

There are many possible reasons for this, but it’s possible that Lexar’s choice of LPDDR4X for the DRAM cache and its firmware tuning creates this outcome. LPDDR4X is very efficient and typically bandwidth does not matter for DRAM’s application on SSDs. However, this DRAM has significantly higher latency, and DRAM is most useful for random writes on SSDs. Lexar appears to have optimized the NM800 Pro to run efficiently and at lower temperatures. This could be a worthwhile tradeoff for many applications.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 

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.

The 2TB NM800 Pro writes within pSLC at 6.55 GBps for over 97 seconds with a cache of 640GB. This is almost the entire drive in pSLC mode, making for a very large cache. TLC shows a write speed of 2.57 GBps for just over 64 seconds before the drive enters folding at 1.4 GBps. This is a good result and in line with the FX900 Pro and GM7000, with some minor differences. The drive is able to recover back to TLC mode without too much difficulty.

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 storage.

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 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.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The NM800 Pro is quite efficient, which is nice. The included heatsink makes for an SSD that would work well in a PS5 or desktop environment. The non-heatsinked version would also be usable for reasons elaborated above, including for laptops.

The drive idled at a sensor reading of 34C which is a very cool temperature. Despite the large cache, the drive only reached 62C after 1TB of writes. This is an excellent result and the drive would operate well with any workload. It stays far cooler than the FX900 Pro with its graphene thermal pad, reinforcing our suspicions that Lexar designed the NM800 Pro to run efficiently and cool.

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.

Conclusion

The Lexar Professional NM800 Pro is a typical high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD that manages to set itself apart in some ways without impressing on the whole. It runs incredibly cool and is very efficient but has inconsistent performance results. It’s placed in a difficult market which ultimately makes it an alternative choice whenever it appears on sale, especially attractive at 2TB. The heatsinked version would be good in a desktop or PS5 while the non-heatsinked version could work in a laptop, thanks to Lexar’s optimizations.

Compared to similar drives, like the HP FX900 Pro, the NM800 Pro is more efficient thanks to its single-sided design and the use of LPDDR4X. This also helps it run cooler as a whole, and a lot cooler with its heatsink. The drive cannot directly compete with the best but it doesn’t have to if it’s priced right. Lexar also gives a boost with the drive’s TBW rating, which would perhaps entice you over its direct rivals when all else is equal. We think the option of a heatsink is a better selling point, though.

The SSD market has been long trending downwards in terms of pricing which makes it challenging to make a wise purchase. It’s perhaps best just to look for the right deal and grab it. It’s better to focus on figuring out what you really need. The NM800 Pro is still viable in some cases. With PCIe 5.0 drives and new hardware coming in the near future, this SSD is probably an impulse buy for your PS5 or for extra storage on your main machine, and that’s okay. It’s just not something worthy of a high score.

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The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 portable SSD is a tiny, lightweight drive up to 4TB that you can easily carry around. It’s very similar to the Corsair EX100U in performance and pricing, with some minor differences. Designed to compete with the best external SSDs, It has TLC flash memory, which is nice, and the embedded design means that it is small and efficient. This flash produces solid sustained write performance, a place where the EX100U eventually falls flat, but the weak UFD controller otherwise holds the nano V2’s performance potential back. This is not significant for many use cases because the USB interface is already restrictive in random performance for heavier workloads.

The 20 Gbps interface is, however, a bonus for traditional sequential workloads such as media file transfers and backups. The tighter and more rugged design of the Rocket nano V2, in contrast to the EX100U, translates to a more reliable experience on the whole, particularly with sustained writes. Direct competitors such as the updated Corsair X6 are stuck with QLC and usually a 10 Gbps interface. The Samsung T7 Shield is also limited to 10 Gbps but is otherwise an excellent portable drive, but it’s also bulkier. The nano V2 is appealing if you need 20 Gbps for burst transfers, high portability with some ruggedness, and a minimum level of sustained write performance.

Specifications of Sabrent Rocket nano V2 

The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is available at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. Launch pricing for these capacities is $119.99, $199.99, and $499.99, respectively. This makes the 2TB model the best value, although pricing may change. It is, of course, still far cheaper than the recently-reviewed SanDisk Pro-G40, but a bit more expensive than the updated Crucial X6. It’s very similar to the Corsair EX100U in design and pricing.

The Rocket nano V2 has a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface and reaches up to 1600/1500 MBps for sequential read and write. Random performance is seldom stipulated for external drives due to interface limitations.

The drive has a 3-year warranty with registration which is not atypical in the industry, although we prefer 5-year for premium products. The drive is very small and lightweight coming in at 2.85 x 1.28 x 0.57 inches and 1.57 ounces, although without the outer silicone shell it’s a bit smaller and lighter. This outer covering does offer better protection against drops.

Software and Accessories of Sabrent Rocket nano V2

The Rocket nano V2 comes with Type-C to Type-A and Type-C to Type-C USB cables. This means it can work on a wider range of devices without you having to buy a separate cable.

As of the time of review, the drive was not supported in Sabrent’s SSD toolbox application, but it may be added later. Sabrent generally offers an OEM version of Acronis True Image Home for its SSDs but this drive is not supported yet. We recommend Macrium Reflect Free for imaging and cloning needs.

A Closer Look at Sabrent Rocket nano V2

The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is a simple, small portable SSD. The overall design is muted but pleasant. An optional silicone shroud offers additional protection. It has a single USB-C port that is not waterproof, in a departure from the EX100U’s annoying solution. It should be pointed out that this is a very lightweight drive which makes its high capacity options quite attractive, considering it manages them without using QLC.

This is an embedded, or hybrid, design, which means that there’s no bridge controller. The Phison U18 is a native UFD controller which makes this closer to a USB drive in many respects. This can reduce cost, complexity, and physical size. It also usually means lower power draw with higher efficiency. It also means that the storage portion cannot be shucked. There are four NAND packages to go along with the controller, two per side.

The Phison U18 controller is only 2-channel with up to 8 chip enable for each channel, which to us suggests it’s best with 8 dies but can manage 16 just fine. Given the capacity range of the Rocket nano V2 it’s possible to use both 512Gb and 1Tb dies, the latter to reach 4TB. This somewhat limits what flash can be used as some TLC is only available at 512Gb and most QLC only at 1Tb.

This gives us a hint about what the Corsair EX100U is using - Corsair would only state 3D TLC - but Sabrent is more explicit about it. To be direct, we would be looking at either Kioxia’s 112-layer BiCS5 TLC or SK hynix’s 128-layer V6 TLC.

This looks like SK hynix’s 128-layer V6 TLC. This is very good flash, famously used in the SK hynix Gold P31, an extremely popular drive. That particular SSD stood out for its excellent power efficiency but its performance was also class-leading. As with the EX100U we see TI DDR4000 ICs which we believe help maintain a high bus speed with this much flash on a 2-channel controller. The EX100U we reviewed appears to have had the same flash but Corsair left open the door to changing it if necessary.

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Comparison Products

The 2TB Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is up against the SanDisk Extreme Pro v2, the Corsair EX100U, the Kingston XS2000, the Samsung T7 Shield, the SanDisk Pro-G40, the Lexar SL660 Blaze, and the Adata SE900G. The XS2000 and SL660 Blaze are being tested at 1TB.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

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.

The Rocket nano V2 is near the bottom in 3DMark, although it does edge out the EX100U. Portable storage is not ideal for high-end gaming, although at this time there is very little difference between any two SSDs when it comes to game load times. This drive would be fine if you wanted to run some games off of it.

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.

PCMark 10 performance tends to follow 3DMark, and that is the case here with the nano V2 again falling behind. The UFD controller operates like a flash drive which can have negative consequences for some performance measurements. This drive is not ideal for heavier application workloads.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

Performance is a bit better in DiskBench, but the USB interface in general is restrictive for all the drives tested except for the Thunderbolt-capable Professional Pro-G40.

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.

ATTO write results are good but read results could be better for the Rocket nano V2. There’s a notable dip at 1MB although performance is acceptable on the whole. CDM sequential performance is also merely fair, with most of the 20 Gbps drives falling within a general range. The 10 Gbps T7 Shield notably falls behind while the TB3 Professional Pro-G40 leads the pack.

Where the nano V2 shines is with random performance in CDM, specifically low queue depth 4KB. The omission of a bridge chip may have helped a bit here, although the flash being used is also quite good. That would explain the XS2000’s relatively poor results in comparison. 4KB performance is an important marker for subjective feel.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The 2TB Rocket nano V2 writes in pSLC mode at almost 1.57GBps for just over 15 seconds with a cache of 24GB. This is a small, dynamic cache, best used to absorb random writes. Recovery in general will be a bit slower. For larger writes, especially sequential ones, sustained performance in TLC mode is at over 800MBps. This is an excellent result for a drive like this and means it can be used for applications where a certain level of consistent performance is desirable, such as with transferring footage.

This is also where the Rocket nano V2 pulls away from the very similar EX100U. Our sustained write test involves the use of active cooling to avoid throttling. The EX100U still throttled while the Rocket nano V2 did not. The Rocket nano V2’s aluminum casing and thermal interface help keep it cool, an important consideration especially in warmer environments. That casing is also more protective in general.

We wanted to get a feel for how this drive handled a sustained load in comparison to the EX100U, a drive that easily throttled, with no active cooling. With sustained writes, the maximum temperature reached by SMART was 75C with the metal part - inside the silicone outer case - reaching 54C. The Rocket nano V2 did not throttle.

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. Portable SSDs are tested with write caching explicitly enabled for the device within Windows.

Conclusion

The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is a capable but unexciting portable SSD. Performance is generally weak but it does well with 4KB and sustained writes, two crucial areas for storage of this type; portable drives are often used to transfer files, particularly larger files, with occasional reading of backup data. The Rocket nano V2 is also quite small and lightweight which makes it easy to carry around, it comes with both types of USB cables you might need, and the metal exterior adds protection and helps keep the drive cool. It checks all the boxes for effective portable storage.

The Rocket nano V2 additionally has an optional silicone case which can add some drop resistance, but the drive lacks an IP rating and the USB port is not waterproof. Coupled with just a 3-year maximum warranty, this reinforces the drive as being budget-oriented. The good news is that it’s available up to 4TB and comes with excellent TLC, factors that help set it apart from some of the competition. The 20 Gbps interface is also nice but of secondary importance.

We are giving this drive the same score as the EX100U despite the fact that the Rocket nano V2 is the better drive. The nano V2 does not have the same throttling issues of the EX100U and the overall design also feels superior, almost like a premium product. However, we cannot score it higher because the performance just isn’t there. That is the trade-off for getting such a small drive, keeping in mind that this is also a very efficient design that won’t completely drain your laptop battery. It really comes down to picking the drive that suits your needs at the right price point, and the Rocket nano V2 is a fair option to have.

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Lexar’s SL660 Blaze is the company's latest portable drive for gaming and comes in 512GB and 1TB capacities. The drive comes with resplendent RGB lighting and includes software support combined with a selection of materials and styling to sell as a 'gaming' drive that will compete for a spot on our list of best external SSDs. 

The SL660 Blaze reminds us a lot of the Kingston XS2000, they share the same hardware, but it comes with some additional features. It also competes with the ADATA SE900G, which also comes with RGB lighting but has a bulkier package. 

As with the XS2000, SE900G, and other portable drives, convenience is the name of the game. Alternatively, you could purchase your own drive and enclosure independently and save money by combining the two yourself. Of course, SATA-based options of both types also often remain viable, but sometimes it’s nice to have 2GBps of bandwidth at your fingertips.

Let’s see how that works out here.

Specifications

The Lexar SL660 Blaze has just two capacities: 512GB and 1TB. The price per gigabyte at the time of writing, which is for pre-orders, is around $0.20 per gigabyte. This is more pricey than the Kingston XS2000, which has fewer frills while being smaller and weighing less. The SL660 Blaze is rated for up to 2.0/1.9GBps for sequential reads and writes, in line with the XS2000. We would expect these write speeds to dip with extended writes once the SLC cache is exhausted.

As with the XS2000, the SL660 Blaze has a five-year warranty and is rated for shock resistance. In addition, the controller itself has typical data protection with SMI’s NANDXtend, a patented technology that has similarities to techniques used on other controllers. This gets the most endurance out of the flash through LDPC error correction and can correct errors through RAID parity. Lexar also offers 256-bit AES encryption, but this is software-based, so it won't be as performant.

Software and Accessories

The SL660 Blaze comes with more than a few items. It has both Type-C to Type-C and Type-C to Type-A USB cables and a detachable stand. These are both convenient as you can dock the drive when near your computer, and the drive will be compatible with two common types of USB ports. The drive also comes with a nice pouch for added convenience and protection, although this may increase overall bulk. The competing Kingston XS200, for its part, did include a rubber sleeve.

The drive also comes with an SSD toolbox, the Lexar SSD Dash, and support for software encryption through Lexar’s DataShield. We have previously stated that hardware encryption with a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) tends not to be a priority for consumer drives and is otherwise potentially inconsistent. Lexar offers a software solution as a checkbox for their feature list, but it is actually usable and useful even if it’s something you could do yourself on other drives with the appropriate software. Likewise, we like to have a SSD toolbox even if it’s generally unnecessary.

A Closer Look

The USB interface can also be its own bottleneck regardless of the internal SSD. Portable drives are also usually streamlined and made to be efficient, which in other words means they often have a DRAM-less design that would benefit from the performance-boosting Host Memory Buffer (HMB) tech — but that doesn't work over the USB interface. Both of these issues present challenges for external drives: Most users use these types of drives for large files or image backups, which are essentially large, sequential file transfers. This type of work can be limited by the interface or by the sequential write speed of the drive, with the latter being impacted by the lack of HMB.

Most previous portable drives came with ASMedia’s bridge chips, such as the ASM2362 and ASM2364 for 10Gbps and 20Gbps, respectively. Portable units tend to have an independent drive with its own controller and a separate bridge chip to handle communication with the host, for example, with two lanes of PCIe 3.0 on one side and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, at up to 20 Gbps, on the other. The newer SM2320 chip from Silicon Motion, as used on the SL660 Blaze and XS2000, instead provides an embedded or hybrid design with everything in one package. This pairs very well with the streamlined intentions of a portable SSD.

The SL660 Blaze has a sleek, aluminum exterior that certainly lends itself to the gaming aesthetic, even without RGB enabled. It’s otherwise clean, with the rear side listing the capacity/model and serial number. The interior shares the black coloring with a bit of protection. Of course, this is not a drive you would have to shuck, given the nature of the prominent SM2320 controller. The black PCB has no DRAM but has four flash packages with two on each side.

The controller, labeled SM2320G, looks to have been manufactured about a year ago. SMI is proud of this quad-channel design, able to manage up to 4TB of flash in a tight 9x9 mm package. While there are disadvantages to having a single chip for a portable drive, the advantages of reduced size and cost generally outweigh them. We also see the four LEDs on the edge of the board, which, as tested, were not controllable but rather just shifted between various colors.

The flash modules are produced by Longsys and labeled 29F208EMLCER. From the “29,” we can tell this is Intel or Micron flash, as in MT29 from the IMFT days, at 2Tb or 256GB per chip in an 8-bit configuration for a total of 1TB. It’s similar to the 96-layer Micron TLC we saw on the XS2000. This is an older flash but is perfectly suitable for a quad-channel portable drive.

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Comparison Products

We compare the Lexar SL660 Blaze to other popular portable SSDs including SanDisk’s Extreme and Extreme Pro (both v2), the Samsung X5 and T7, the WD Black P50, the Adata SE900G, and of course the Kingston XS2000. Two of these drives are at the 2TB capacity but this should offer no advantage in this drive class.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

The SL660 Blaze is marketed as a gaming drive, so it’s nice to see it delivers a very good result here. SSDs, in general, offer the best loading times, and it can be nice to have a portable option if you’re on the go or if you use a gaming laptop.

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 1TB SL660 Blaze is in the middle of the pack here, right alongside the Kingston XS2000. We see better results from the SanDisk Extreme Pro v2, which has DRAM, and the Samsung X5, which utilizes Thunderbolt 3 and also has DRAM.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The 1TB SL660 Blaze, along with the XS2000, is on top of the USB-based portable drives. It offers very fast transfer times and is only beaten by the ThunderBolt 3-equipped X5.

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.

Users transfer files of various sizes regularly with portable drives, so it’s important to look at transfer speeds for different block sizes in ATTO. The SL660 Blaze only comes up short for sequential reads versus the Samsung X5, which again has a ThunderBolt 3 interface. It also falls slightly behind the ASM2364-based drives at larger sequential write sizes, which points to a difference in controller limitations.

CrystalDiskMark, that most popular of SSD benchmarks, just shows the interface's limits for peak sequential reads and writes. We see a bit of a different story with random performance. Random write performance is quite good, and the SL660 Blaze again matches the XS2000 while falling behind only the X5 at low queue depth. Reduced write latency may be a product of the hybrid design, as writes require acknowledgment. However, we see the SM2320 drives falling behind along with Samsung’s T7 Touch during a low queue depth read workload.

This is likely due to the controller being DRAM-less - the same is also true of the T7’s Pablo controller - which can exacerbate the limitations of the interface. Low queue depth random reads are often utilized as a guideline for general user experience, yet we saw the SL660 Blaze do quite well with the Final Fantasy XIV benchmark - at least in comparison to other portable SSDs. There is simply a performance threshold where you get most of the gains of a solid state drive, but portables are limited by interface. This illustrates why a DRAM-less design like the SM2320 can still be optimal for a portable drive, and certainly so for gaming.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

Continuing from the Crystal Disk Mark results above, we can then speculate that a DRAM-less SSD may still have significant shortfalls as a secondary effect. This is clearly the case in the write saturation test.

Our results are very similar to what we saw with the XS2000. The drive writes at maximum speed, or 1.8Gbps, for approximately 55s, for a total cache size of around 100GB. From what we understand these drives utilize a hybrid cache, with 6GB of static and the rest being dynamic.

After the cache is exhausted, the sequential write performance is very erratic. The drive is folding to native TLC which eventually frees up enough SLC for a brief spike in write throughput, before falling back down. Overall post-SLC sequential write bandwidth is around 200MBps, which is certainly not great and is reminiscent of some QLC-based desktop drives. The T7 Touch relies on a much smaller cache but then engages direct-to-TLC. For that reason, it is faster and its more consistent post-SLC performance can out-write the SL660 Blaze and XS2000.

DRAM-less drives tend to have weaker post-SLC performance due to larger SLC cache sizes, fewer flash channels, and an overall design philosophy that benefits from the slower folding state. While the T7 outpaces the SL660 Blaze and XS2000 it still falls behind the rest of the drives in sustained writes, and interface limitations squeeze it with shorter writes.

Cache recovery on the SL660 Blaze was similar to the XS2000, with the static portion recovering relatively rapidly and the dynamic portion requiring more time. However, it’s a fairly reasonable response given how this drive will be used. Those regularly doing large, sustained writes, which could include videographers, for example, might want to look at a different portable drive, but this cache should be adequate for gaming even in a fuller-drive state.

We had good thermal results from the XS2000 but we would expect them to be even better with the SL660 Blaze due to its aluminum case and interior design. This proved to be true as the surface was 5C cooler than the XS2000’s under load, at 31C, with the drive itself reaching around 7C less, or 64C, as measured by an IR gun. We certainly saw no throttling and idle temperatures were also good.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket 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.

Conclusion

It is difficult for us not to compare the Lexar SL660 Blaze to the Kingston XS2000 because the internal hardware is similar, and our test results point out plenty of similarities. The SL660 Blaze has a higher price point, which is sensible as it offers more than the XS2000. For example, it comes with an extra cable, a detachable stand, RGB functionality, and software support that includes encryption. It maintains shock resistance but is also larger and weighs more. In a sense, this makes it less portable, but the aluminum body and overall design make it more attractive. Plus, it remains sufficiently convenient.

This is being marketed as a gaming drive which tends not to mean a whole lot in the SSD space — for now. However, the angular design and presence of RGB are probably sufficient to match the requirements of such a moniker. The detachable stand is also a nice feature when considering the possibilities of portable gaming, even if used with a console. 

The Sl600's warranty is strong and the drive feels durable, particularly with the pouch, which we feel is a strong selling point if you’re moving the drive around a lot. Although we question the usefulness of software encryption with a gaming drive, software support is a nice touch, but there are other options available that don’t require Lexar's proprietary software. We wouldn’t mind some OEM software for drive cloning, though.

Aside from some minor pitfalls, the SL600's performance is actually not bad for a portable drive. The one area it does fall short is during sustained, sequential write workloads, which exhibit very poor post-cache performance. The cache design itself is robust even if the cache is not particularly large, but this issue will be more troublesome with a fuller drive. While this is not usually a problem for gaming, if you also want to also use this drive to transfer files, particularly larger ones, some alternatives are more attractive in terms of speed and consistency.

Therefore, the SL660 Blaze’s traits are a bit of a double-edged sword. You don’t really need anything special for gaming, so what you are really paying for — versus, say, the XS2000 — is basically aesthetics. The extra cable and the standalone dock are useful additions but may be of situational use. It’s possible to get a cheaper drive if performance is your top priority, making this a luxury item.

ADATA’s SE900G also offers RGB and the extra cable but appears to have a lower MSRP. Is it worth a premium for the dock and Lexar’s software package? Probably not, but we do feel Lexar did a good job of making a product with a premium feel, although we would have liked to see a 2TB option given the size of games these days. That being said, the dock might be useful for certain users.

If you want a portable SSD with a “gaming” feel, something that also feels a bit premium with the aluminum enclosure, pouch, stand, and RGB, then this is the ticket. We feel the market is inundated with gaming-oriented SSDs that are really an excuse to charge more for aesthetics and semi-useful features. We will say that it’s nice Lexar includes a ton of accessories, but someone willing to do a bit of legwork can likely find something just as good for less money. The Lexar SL660 Blaze is for the gamer who has everything.

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Lexar has introduced its new lineup of SSDs that bring together extreme performance, a graphene heat spreader, and extended longevity. The Professional NM800 drives are designed primarily for high-performance desktops and inexpensive mobile or desktop workstations that can benefit from its characteristics. Interestingly, the SSDs are not too expensive too. 

Designed to compete with the best SSDs, Lexar's Professional NM800 comes in an M.2 2280 form-factor, has a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, and is powered by an unknown NVMe 1.4-compliant controller coupled with 3D TLC NAND memory. The drives are set to be available in 512GB and 1TB versions. 

The 1TB SKU is rated for an up to 7400 MBps sequential read speed, up to 5800 MBps sequential write speed, up to 400K random read IOPS, and up to 750K random write IOPS. The 512GB model is slightly slower and is rated for up to 7000 MBps sequential reads, up to 3000 MBps sequential writes, up to 200K random reads, and up to 550K random writes, reports TechX. 

Typically, drives that are rated for up to 7400 MBps reads come with large heatsinks that prevent their installation into laptops and sometimes even into small form-factor desktops. By contrast, Lexar equipped its Professional NM800 SSDs come with a graphene heat spreader that is thin and allows the drives to be used inside notebooks. The manufacturer does not disclose which controller it uses, so we do not know anything how sustainable its performance is under high loads. 

But performance is not the only advantage that Lexar's Professional NM800 SSDs have. The drives are rated for 0.44 drive writes per day (DWPD), which is higher than that of typical consumer-grade SSDs and which will be appreciated by content creators who tend to write huge amounts of data. 

Lexar's Professional NM800 drives offer a unique combination of features, but unlike workstation-grade SSDs, these products are not too expensive. The 512GB SKU is priced at around €100 in Europe, whereas the 1TB version carries a €180 price tag.

Lexar has launched the a new series of DDR4 memory kits to compete with the best RAM on the market. The Hades lineup, which is available in both RGB and non-RGB trims, aims to serve gamers and performance users.

The Hades (RGB) memory arrives with a black, aluminum heat spreader. In the case of the RGB variant, it features a RGB diffuser up to to provide a vibrant display of colors. The manufacturer provides its own Lexar RGB Sync software to customize the memory's illumination. Nonetheless, the lighting is compatible with a wide range of motherboard ecosystems, including Asus Aura Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion 2.0, MSI Mystic Light and ASRock Polychrome Sync.

Lexar commercializes the Hades (RGB) as single modules and dual-channel kits. The memory modules come with a capacity of 8GB or 16GB. The available capacities for the dual-channel kits are 16GB (2x8GB) and 32GB (2x16GB). Lexar decided not to go overboard on the frequency.

The Hades (RGB) clocks in at DDR4-3200 and DDR4-3600. The first has its timings configured for 16-18-18-38, while the latter arrives with 18-22-22-42 timings. Regardless of the frequency, both memory kits require a 1.35V DRAM voltage and support XMP 2.0 for an easy and fast setup.

Lexar's new memory kits are available exclusively on Amazon. The Hades RGB DDR4-3200 16GB (2x8GB) and 32GB (2x16GB) memory kits retail for $103.99 and $199.99, respectively. The DDR4-3600 variants go for $109.99 and $216.99, respectively. As for the vanilla Hades DDR4-3600 memory kits, the 16GB (2x8) presentation sells for $97.99 and the 32GB (2x16GB) version commands a $209.99 price tag.

Features and Specifications

Lexar, which was bought by Chinese SSD maker Longsys back in 2017, has been busy churning out new internal and external SSDs as of late. Here we're looking at the company’s entry-level NVMe drive, the NM600 and seeing how it stacks up against the competition. The NM600 is poised to displace its SATA competition with aggressive pricing and speedy performance figures. But, does it have what it takes to keep up with M.2 alternatives?

At the core of Lexar’s NM600 is Silicon Motion’s SM2263XT, a 4-channel PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe controller. It's similar to the controller powering the Intel SSD 660p and Crucial P1, but with one catch. The SM2263 utilizes a DRAM cache for the FTL mapping table, while the XT model doesn’t. Rather than incorporate DRAM in its architecture, Silicon Motion took advantage of a rather new NVMe feature called Host Memory Buffer (HMB).

DRAMless SSD controllers have typically offered low performance, especially when taxed with moderate workloads. That’s why HMB came into existence, it tries to speed things up and enable NVMe SSDs to match SATA-level pricing. Instead of using DRAM on the device, HMB technology enables the SM2263XT to utilize a small portion of the system’s RAM as a cache space for the controller’s mapping table. Without the need for DRAM in its design, the NM600 is able to hit the market at low prices and still deliver acceptable performance.

Specifications

Lexar’s NM600 is available in just two capacities, 240GB and 480GB. Based off of these capacity points, we can see that Lexar opted to give them a little bit more over-provisioning to help with performance consistency.

The 240GB model offers rated performance of up to 2.0/1.2GBps read/write, while the 480GB model can hit up to 2.1/1.6GBps read/write under sequential workloads. As this is a DRAMless SSD at lower capacities, their random IOPS performance isn’t the best. The 240GB model is rated for up to 100,000/151,000 IOPS read/write, and the 480GB model is rated for up to 188,000/156,000 IOPS.

These SSDs have a total bytes written (TBW) rating of 120TB at the 240GB capacity and 240TB at the 480GB capacity.  And the NM600 is covered by a 3-year warranty, similar to other entry-level SSDs.

HMB isn't the NM600's only trick. The drive also features pseudo-SLC caching, which utilizes some of the NAND in an SLC mode for caching bursts of inbound writes. On the flip side, sustained performance isn’t as good as the rated figures. It also supports LDPC (Low-Density Parity Check) error correction code to ensure data integrity and reliability over time. You can also securely erase the device, so if you decide to sell it later on all data will be unrecoverable (or at least not very easily recoverable) by a third party.

A Closer Look

Lexar’s NM600 comes in an M.2 2280 form factor, with a black PCB which helps with aesthetics. But the crooked white sticker on top kind of ruins the look at the same time.

In conjunction with the DRAMless Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller, the NM600 features Micron’s 64L 3D TLC NAND flash. With four packages on the top size of the PCB, the NM600 is also a single-sided form factor design. No other components are on the bottom side, which makes it compatible with the few mobile devices that require the thinner size.

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512GB Performance Results

Comparison Products

Today, we pit a few entry-level and mainstream competitors against Lexar’s NM600. As one of the fastest and most expensive M.2 options, we’ve included the Samsung 970 EVO Plus which features Samsung’s latest 9xL 3D V-NAND and the Phoenix penta-core NVMe controller. Additionally, featuring SMI’s SM2262EN NVMe controller and Micron 64L TLC NAND flash we’ve included ADATA’s XPG SX8200 Pro, alongside the MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro, which is built on Phison’s E12 controller and Toshiba’s BiCS3 64L TLC NAND flash.

As entry-level competition, we included the WD Blue SN500, which has an in-house NVMe controller and BiCS3 flash, as well as Crucial’s P1 drive, which utilizes the SM2263EN controller and Micron’s 64L QLC NAND flash. We also tossed in the Crucial MX500, a top-value SATA-based SSD on the low end, alongside the Intel Optane 905P on the high end, as well as a WD Blue hard drive in some tests.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood benchmark is a real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

Lexar’s NM600 offers great read performance for games. With a total load time of 19.10 seconds, the NM600 easily beats the plain old HDD. Beyond that, it outperforms the entry-level SSDs in the test pool and even the MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro, but is slightly behind the top-end SSDs here.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom 50GB block of data. Our data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. We copy the files to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5 GB file.

Again, the NM600 outperforms the entry-level SSDs in our comparison pool and absolutely decimates the Crucial MX500 in copying our test folder. When it comes to reads, its performance is very competitive and bests the other entry-level SSDs again. However, its DRAMless design is outpaced by the DRAM-based Samsung and ADATA drives.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

Among the entry-level SSDs, WD’s Blue SN500 takes a lead in PCMark 8. But all, including the NM600, trail the mainstream competitors. The NM600 still delivers performance that's better than the MX500 and again, it outperforms the Crucial P1. Overall, the Lexar drive lands in 6th place. 

SYSmark 2014 SE

Like PCMark, SYSmark uses real applications to measure system performance. SYSmark takes things much further, however. It utilizes fourteen different applications to run real workloads with real data sets to measure how overall system performance impacts the user experience. BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 SE installs a full suite of applications for its tests, which includes Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, Corel WinZip, several Adobe software applications, and GIMP. That also makes it a great test to measure the amount of time it takes to install widely-used programs after you install a fresh operating system.

When it comes to responsiveness, Lexar’s NM600 is just as responsive as its DRAM-based competition. Overall, it attains a few points less than the MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro and edges above the WD Blue SN500 for 5th place here.

Trace Testing – SPECworkstation 3

Like PCMark 8, SPECworkstation 3 is a trace-based benchmark, but it is designed to push the system harder by measuring workstation performance in professional applications. The full suite consists of more than 30 workloads, but we've opted to only run the storage benchmark which uses only 15 of them and categorizes the results into 5 market segments for scoring: Media & Entertainment, Product Development, Life Sciences, Energy, and General Operations.

While the NM600 proved itself in light, consumer-like workloads, SPECworkstation 3 smacked its prosumer dreams with a heavy hand. Even with sequential performance that hits multi-gigabytes, this SSD scores lower than even the SATA based MX500 overall. For prosumer tasks, DRAM-based SSDs are the way to go. 

Synthetic Testing - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

Out of the entry-level comparison drives, the NM600 has the best sequential read performance over various file sizes and hits nearly 2.1GBps read. Write performance lags slightly at smaller file sizes, however. Once the file size increases to 32KB and beyond, the NM600 maintains 1.65GBps throughput.

Synthetic Testing - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices.

Our iometer testing reveals similar results as ATTO for sequential performance, up to 2.1/1.6GBps read/write, just as rated. Random reads at QD 1 match top-end competitors, but writes trail the NVMe- based competition. When averaging QD1-4, reads are again competitive and writes end up being lower than the MX500, hence the lower SPECworkstation 3 results we saw earlier. Peak random performance also exceeds the rated values from Lexar. 

Sustained Sequential Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a pseudo-SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the pSLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the pSLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.

Lexar’s NM600 has a pSLC cache that seems to be about 67GB in size. After filling it, write performance degraded to an average rate of about 200MBps. Within the first minute of writing, the drive is able to outperform most competitors, but beyond that most competitors are able to out-write it. Overall, the Lexar drive outperforms the Crucial P1, which has QLC NAND, but it isn’t able to outperform the SATA-based MX500 after five minutes of sustained writing.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. 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 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 faster, which ultimately saves power.

Like the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro and WD Blue SN500, the Lexar NM600 is highly efficient in our 50GB file transfer test. It consumes a bit more than the WD consumes on average, but it consumes a watt less on average than the ADATA and most other competitors. At idle, HMB seems to add a bit to power consumption, but still, 147mW at idle is significantly less than a hard drive.

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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.

Image Credits: Tom's Hardware

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Plain Jane SATA

Lexar’s got a bunch of new SSDs in the market, but are they any good? Today, we check out their NS200, a SATA 6 GBps SSD that promises to deliver speeds of up to 550 / 510 MBps read/write and the ability to keep on chugging through all your applications with fairly high endurance capabilities. And, to top things off, the device is priced competitively, but it won’t deliver you all the value alternatives will as it lacks support software at this time, at least in the US.

Lexar, an old name in the storage industry known best for the company’s Jump drives is now the consumer brand for the Chinese company Longsys. With the recent adoption, the company now has a plethora of SATA and NVMe SSD products for anyone looking to upgrade their storage to flash. The NS200 is the company's fastest SATA SSD and after looking at the design, it becomes apparent why.

Rather than go the DRAMless route, Lexar’s NS200 boasts a Silicon Motion SM2258 SATA controller, which utilizes a DRAM cache, and Micron’s 64L TLC NAND. These are high-class components that have proven themselves in other SSDs like the ADATA SU900, Crucial BX300, and most notably the Crucial MX500. But, that’s not all. The NS200 is a SATA 6 GBps SSD that is available in three mainstream capacities: 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB. Based on these capacities, the company has also opted to increase the over-provisioning for added performance and reliability over usable space for the end-user, something their lower-tiered NS100 doesn’t.

Specifications

The NS200 is capable of up to 550 MBps read and 520 MBps write speeds under sequential workloads and in terms of random 4K performance, Lexar rates it at up to 95,000 / 90,000 IOPS read/write.  While faster than an HDD, this is significantly lower than what most NVMe SSDs are capable of today. Fortunately, the NS200 is priced fairly competitively at the larger capacities. The 480GB and 960GB NS200 are about $0.11-0.13 per GB while the 240GB model is priced at about $0.19 per GB.

Lexar’s NS200 supports a bunch of standard features such as S.M.A.R.T. data reporting, Trim, and secure erase support. Its endurance ratings are impressive for a SATA device. They aren’t as high as Samsung’s 860 EVO, but with LDPC ECC and some extra over-provisioning, figures come in at up to 480TBW for the 960GB model, surpassing that of the WD Blue 3D and even Crucial’s MX500. What it lacks, however, is a 5-year warranty, rather it features just a 3-year warranty like most cheap SSDs.

Software and Accessories

Lexar includes their own SSD Toolbox for download on their website, Lexar SSD Dash. It provides up-to-date drive health, drive condition, and S.M.A.R.T status information to help you monitor the device.  However, unlike most manufacturer’s they do not offer any free cloning software. As well, at the time of writing, the download for their software is unavailable in the US due to government requirements blocking it.

A Closer Look

Lexar’s NS200 comes in a 2.5-inch form factor and is 7mm thick, like most other 2.5-inch SSDs. Looks-wise, the design is clean and well branded, it won’t take away from aesthetics like WD’s Blue 3D can, but the case is all plastic. Thus, it is rather easy to twist and bend, unlike Samsung’s 860 series and Crucial’s MX500 SSDs which feature a full metal case. Not a huge deal-breaker, but it’s not on par feel wise.

Within the case is a small, half-sized PCB with four of Micron’s 64L 3D TLC NAND flash chips that have been labeled as Lexar’s own. Managing the flash, we see Silicon Motion’s SM2258 SATA controller, one that features a DRAM cache for accelerating access to the FTL map, which helps to keep up performance, even under strenuous workloads. For this task Lexar has opted to utilize a bit of SK Hynix’s DDR3 memory, which is more than fast enough.

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1TB Performance Results

Comparison Products

We pitted the Lexar NS200 against its near-identical twin and one of the highest-value based SSDs in the market, the Crucial MX500. As well, we threw Samsung’s premium-cost 860 EVO into the mix and Intel’s 545s with the slightly newer SM2259 controller powering it. We also threw in WD’s Blue 3D SSD and Crucial’s DRAMless BX500 which utilizes Silicon Motion’s SM2258XT controller. Additionally, all feature 3D TLC NAND flash, except for one. We also included Intel’s 1TB 660p for our application comparisons as we lack 500GB sample to compare directly. It comes with Intel’s 3D QLC NAND and is powered by an SMI SM2263 NVMe controller.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood benchmark is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

Lexar’s NS200 display’s some very impressive game load performance. With a total load time of 21.99 seconds, the NS200 powers to second place in our comparison pool. We can also see that it is significantly faster than an HDD and not too much slower than Intel’s 660p.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom 50GB block of data. Our data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. We copy the files to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5 GB file.

Again, the NS200 powers to second place, displacing the more expensive Intel SSD 545s and Samsung 860 EVO with a data rate that is 17 MBps faster. Compared to the low-end BX500 and WD Blue HDD, Lexar’s NS200 is about three times faster at file copies. Read performance ties Samsung and Intel too, with a rate of 503 MBps SATA performance doesn’t get much better than this. Still, Intel’s 660p takes the win, outperforming the whole group with its NVMe goodness.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

Tasking the drive with some applications we can see that the NS200 isn’t quite as fast as the competitors and it falls into 5^th place here. It is almost as fast as the MX500 in this instance, but it can’t keep up with the likes of the Samsung 860 EVO if you are looking for one of the best performing SATA SSDs out. It is still light-years ahead of a standard HDD, however.

SYSmark 2014 SE

Like PCMark, SYSmark uses real applications to measure system performance. SYSmark takes things much further, however. It utilizes fourteen different applications to run real workloads with real data sets to measure how overall system performance impacts the user experience. BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 SE installs a full suite of applications for its tests, which includes Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, Corel WinZip, several Adobe software applications, and GIMP. That also makes it a great test to measure the amount of time it takes to install widely-used programs after you install a fresh operating system.

Lexar’s NS200 was able to install the software suite at a rapid pace, faster than any other SSD in our comparison pool. After running the benchmark, the NS200 attained a responsiveness score of 1607 points, which nearly matches the Crucial MX500, but again, Samsung and Intel are in the lead with slightly better performance.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

Sequential performance falls in line with the competition across the various file sizes tested. In ATTO the NS200 maxes out at 564 / 527 MB/s read/write.

Synthetic Testing - CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use file size benchmarking tool.

Like its performance in ATTO, Lexar’s NS200 delivers sequential performance of over 560 /520 MBps read/write, which is similar to the competition. Its 4K random performance is a little weaker, however. At a QD of 1, it delivers 34 MBps read and 106 MBps write. While write performance is on par with the rest, read performance lags a bit which is why we saw slightly lower application performance in our test suites. Still, it is much better than the Crucial’s BX500’s scores, especially when averaging out QDs 1-4.

Sustained Sequential Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a pseudo-SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the pSLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the pSLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.

Like almost every SSD out these days, the NS200 features a pSLC cache. Fortunately, this cache is large and dynamic. After writing 143GB of data, the buffer filled and sustained write performance degraded to an average of 275 MBps. Because the cache is so large and dynamic, sustained performance takes a hit compared to that of the MX500 or other competitors which feature smaller caches for improved consistency. Still, this is plenty of performance for most home users that task the drive small write bursts throughout the day rather than large sequential transfers.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop.

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 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 faster, which ultimately saves power.

The NS200’s power consumption is very well managed. Averaging 1.63W and hitting a max of just 3.31W during our 50GB transfer, it scores the highest on our efficiency chart. It also consumes just 51mW when at idle with Link Power Management enabled. That number grows to under half a watt when disabled, but it still beats the MX500’s consumption results.

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Conclusion

Lexar’s NS200 is a decent SSD for those looking to upgrade from a hard drive or a smaller capacity SATA SSD. It speeds up your boot and application load times as well as will hold you over while fragging noobs in your favorite games. But it lacks in overall value.

Performance is nearly on par with most mainstream competitors and it even outperformed our comparison pool during game loads and file transfers. It lags slightly in random read performance though. Fortunately, in day-to-day use cases, this difference goes almost unnoticed. And, sequential performance is good enough to keep up with those who work with various 10—50GB files and then some. Although, competitors do offer slightly better-sustained speeds once their pSLC caches fill.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with any cloning software and, at the time of writing, the U.S. government prohibits U.S. customers from downloading their SSD toolbox, Lexar Dash. As an entry-level device, it also lacks a 5-year warranty that most mainstream competitors feature. But it does boast some very good endurance figures that outclass even the Crucial MX500 and WD Blue 3D.

Pricing is in line with most SATA SSDs these days, but we recommend waiting for it to go on sale. At almost $0.13 per GB, the 960GB model is one of the best values, but the 480GB model we tested for this review still provides pretty good bang for your buck. We would recommend the Crucial MX500 over it, however, for a number of reasons.

The MX500 offers slightly better application performance, sustained write performance, including supporting software that you can use in the US. It supports hardware encryption, and has a longer warranty for essentially the same price. The MX500 also comes in a fully metal enclosure rather than cheaper plastic.

Then there is the fact that Intel’s 660p continues to dominate in price. With prices that are lower than the NS200 at the 500GB and 1TB capacity and performance that is multiples higher than what SATA can offer, it is one of the best options out if you are looking for a cheap SSD for your next build and aren’t tied to the 2.5” form factor or SATA interface. Plus, with the 660p’s  M.2 form factor, there’s no mess of power and SATA cables to deal with.

Image Credits: Tom's Hardware

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NVMe over USB, but at what cost?

Lexar, which was bought by Chinese SSD maker Longsys back in 2017 after previous owner Micron announced it was getting out of the retail removable storage business, is offering up a new SL100 Pro portable SSD and with impressive performance ratings. With speeds of up to 950/900 MBps read/write, this USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 device is speedier than the typical run-of-the mill SATA based external SSD. Its small size and shape make it very pocketable for those who are constantly on the go, and it features beautiful aesthetics. But pricing needs to be brought back down to earthly levels before it gets our recommendation.

Lexar has been in the flash memory business for over 20 years, though recent times have been rocky, the brand seems to be back on track.Two years later its acquisition, the company has launched the world’s first 1TB SD card and a new series of NVMe and SATA based SSDs. Alongside these launches also comes an external drive aimed at the creative professional, the SL100 Pro, which we are taking a close look at today in the 1TB capacity.

The SL100 Pro is the faster variant of their SL100 external SSD. It uses the latest USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 interface to deliver high-performance for the working professional, double what the SL100 or any SATA SSD can do. It features a darker look than the SL100’s grey finish and features a higher capacity option than the non-pro model, which tops out at 500GB.

Specifications

Lexar originally launched the SL100 Pro in three capacities: 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. But, since have dropped the 250GB model, although some can still be found from some online retailers. Th drive features a three-year warranty and is compatible with both Mac and PC. Out of the box, it comes pre-formatted as exFAT, although our testing was completed while formatted as NTFS.

With current prices being about double what most other external SSDs go for, pricing is a big issue for the SL100 Pro product line. Speeds of up to 950/900 MB/s read and write are faster than SATA based competitors, but not fast enough to warrant double the cost. A simple USB 3.1 Gen 2 NVMe enclosure like a the Pluggable USBC-NVMe or MyDigitalSSD M2X plus a standard NVMe SSD would come in cheaper and offer just about the same level of performance, as we noted in our recent feature: How to Build Your Own External SSD.

Software and Accessories

Included in the package are the portable SSD itself and two short USB cables. One is USB-C to USB-C while the other is USB-C to USB-A cable. The latter is much appreciated for broad compatibility, since many PCs don't yet have USB-C ports, or might just have one, while USB-A is much more common.

Lexar’s SL100 Pro SSD also works with ENC’s DataVault Lite software for added security. When enabled, it utilizes 256-bit AES encryption to encrypt data on the device to keep it safe from prying eyes. As another bonus, this helps to ensure your deleted data stays deleted as well. Files that are deleted from the vault are also securely erased and can’t be recovered. There is just one issue here, however. At the time of writing, due to US government requirements, the download for the software was temporarily unavailable until further notice, and it doesn’t come pre-loaded on the device. So if security and encryption are high on your priorities list, you should probably look elsewhere--at least until the software becomes available again.

Closer Look

The drive measures 55 x 73.4 x 10.8 mm and weighs in at just over 69 grams. Lexar’s SL100 Pro features a blacked-out brushed aluminum exterior that is as stylish as it is durable. It feels solid in the hand and has a bit of heft to it. As an SSD, it should be able to withstand significant drops and shock and still keep going, unlike the spinning platters and delicate read/write heads of hard drives.

As we said before, this isn’t your typical run-of-the-mill SATA-based external SSD. It’s not quite as fast as some of the Thunderbolt 3 devices available, but with a custom-designed PCB and the fastest USB interface currently available, it's quite fast. And powering it is an interesting combination of components.

Inside of this classy exterior is a JMicron JMS583 USB to NVMe bridge chip that connects to a Marvell 88NV1160 NVMe SSD controller that is, in turn, managing a bunch of 64L Micron TLC NAND flash. This controller is a lower-end model but obviously has enough grunt to saturate the interface, even without DRAM.

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Performance Results

Comparison Products

In today’s review, we'll be pitting the SL100 Pro against a few other external SSDs and HDDs that we have recently tested. Powered by HDDs, we’ve included the 2TB LaCie Mobile Drive and 4TB Rugged RAID Pro. Stepping things up, we added in the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD and 480GB Kingston HyperX Savage EXO, which both deliver SATA SSD performance over USB. As well, we’ve included some Thunderbolt-based competition to heat things up a bit: a 1TB G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro and 1TB Samsung X5, both high-end (and expensive) Thunderbolt 3 devices.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the transfer or copy performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of iPhone jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos from a Canon 6D), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

Lexar’s SL100 Pro rips through our test files with ease. It ranks third overall, behind our two Thunderbolt 3 comparison devices. In our real-world file write transfer tests, the photos folder wrote the fastest at 971 MB/s and read the fastest of 886 MB/s with the 3.7GB read file. Looking at things time-wise, the Lexar drive offers a significant advantage over the HDDs and a decent improvement in performance over the HyperX Savage EXO and SanDisk Extreme in every task.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

In PCMark 8, the SL100 Pro pulls in a score of 4,945 points and achieved an average bandwidth of 223MB/s. While significantly faster in sequential tasks like large file reading and writing over SATA based USB devices, random performance seems to be rather similar in applications. And, as you can see, it is significantly faster than any HDD.

Synthetics - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

Lexar’s SL100 Pro hits top speeds of 1,076/923 MBps read and write in ATTO. This beats the manufacturer's ratings, which is always nice to see.

Synthetics - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices.

At a queue depth of one, the Lexar SL100 Pro’s 4KB random read latency is double that of its competitors, which results in about half of the IOPS delivery. Overall, its random performance lags behind the other NVMe and SATA SSD based competitors on average from queue depths 1-4. This is probably why we saw a slightly lower score than that of the SanDisk’s. And, just as we saw in ATTO, it ranks in third place in sequential performance, hitting peak speeds of 918/898 MBps, respectively.

Write Saturation and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and inter-related metrics for external devices. We threw in this one last test to measure the performance of the drive over a 15-minute window, writing to the full span of the drive. When possible, we also log the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. This test also reveals if the drive has a pseudo-SLC cache, which is a small portion of faster-programmed flash that absorbs incoming write workloads. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

Write performance for the Lexar drive was looking pretty solid, until we performed this test. Here we find that the SL100 Pro features a large and dynamic pseudo-SLC write cache. From empty, the cache seems to function pretty well. Up to the five-minute mark, it absorbed double the amount of data as the SanDisk Extreme. After that, however, it started slowing down until it ultimately wrote at a rate of just 180 MB/s due to its DRAMless design.

We were unable to log the S.M.A.R.T. data while writing data, but we still caught a few updates throughout testing. At most, our temperature readings were reporting ~55 degrees C and the unit was just warm to the touch.

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Conclusion

Lexar’s SL100 Pro is more semi-pro than professional. For those who are just looking for a sleek and speedy portable SSD, it will most likely suit your needs. It delivers performance numbers in the 1,000MBps range, but there is a catch. While its pSLC cache can be quite fast, once saturated, its direct-to-TLC write speeds are very poor, averaging 180MBpss. As a professional-labeled product, I would expect write speed to be much better overall considering the cost of the unit. SanDisk’s Extreme maintains full write performance at all times with an average speed that is triple that of the SL100 Pro’s.

Now, depending on your use case, this may not affect you in most day to day use. We wrote over 300GB to the Lexar drive before write speeds slowed down. So, if you aren’t writing hundreds of GB at once often (and from a similarly speedy drive), the SL100 Pro should keep up. You can definitely record and work on 4K media with these speeds. During our file transfer tests, we saw great performance as well when toying with 25-50GB file folders and large, multi-GB files. Temperatures were fine too.

After using the device for a good bit of time, we also came up with a few other minor complaints: Lexar could improve the device by giving it more grip to rest securely on whatever surface you place it on. Also, I'd like t see slightly longer USB cables included. I often found that these two issues make positioning the device around our laptop or on your desktop either a bit bothersome or nearly impossible. As well, considering the free encryption support is currently void in the US, one of its main value points is irrelevant.

But the biggest issue we have with the device at this time is the cost. At nearly double the price of SATA-based competitors, is the Lexar SL100 Pro really worth it for double the transfer performance? Considering the rather slow direct-to-TLC write speeds, we don’t think so. The performance doesn’t justify such a high price point. You are better off purchasing a JMicron JMS583 based NVMe SSD enclosure like the Pluggable or MyDigitalSSD M2X and an NVMe SSD to make your own external SSD at current prices.

The Lexar SL100 Pro has a lot going for it, but maybe a bit too much going against it too. Until Lexar brings prices down to more competitive levels, this drive isn't worth it unless you have money to burn. Otherwise, if you’re paying that kind of cash, go ahead and build your own or opt for something in the faster Thunderbolt 3 flavor if you have the requisite ports on your computing devices.

Image Credits: Tom's Hardware

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The popular saying that "today's wars are won with chips" applies to both traditional and economic warfare, and China's reliance on western technology is a strategic weakness that has the country embarking on multi-year initiatives to reduce its reliance on foreign chips.

To that effect, China instituted a plan to develop its own home-grown chips, providing incentives and other measures to indigenous manufacturers. Some of those measures have come to fruition through partnerships with U.S. companies, like AMD's licensing of its x86 architecture to Hygon, and the slow but steadily-increasing number of foreign-owned silicon fabs popping up in China. In either case, China's memory imports, which include the flash memory used in SSDs, have increased 40% since 2016, meaning this segment of the market continues to be a vexing issue for those in China's halls of power.

But what does all of this have to do with SSDs? Well, all the compute power in the world is worthless if you can't store the data, and SSDs are unequivocally the path forward for storage. That makes the recent Longsys announcement that it has developed a 100% China-produced SSD all the more interesting.

SSD performance largely hinges on the SSD controller, a microchip that orchestrates all of the various components, but these small processors are amazingly complex. They also tend to come from Western suppliers. To circumvent that issue, Longsys tapped China-based Yeetor Microelectronics and Maxio Technology's new GK2302 SSD controller design for its new SSDs. These controllers support capacities up to 4TB and come with a few key requirements for the Chinese market: Much like the AMD spin-off processors built by Hygon, these SSDs come with Chinese government-approved encryption and decryption mechanisms to keep out prying Western eyes. 

With a China-indigenous SSD controller in hand, the company turned to China-native Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), a subsidiary of the Chinese government-backed Tsinghua Unigroup, for the actual NAND flash. YMTC has its new 64-layer Xtacking 3D flash coming to market in 2019, which meshes well with Longsys's announcement that the fully China-made SSDs will come to market this year. YMTC also plans to move forward to 128-layer flash in 2020, which we expect will make an appearance in Longsys's future generations of SSDs.

Technical details are slight, but we do know that the Longys's as-yet-unnamed SSDs will come with the SATA 6 Gb/s interface and the company claims it will deliver up to 500 MB/s of throughput. That's standard for today's SSDs that saturate the SATA interface. The company claims the SSD controllers are 15% faster than their predecessors and have 6.5% lower power consumption. The company hasn't shared other fine-grained specifications, like random read and write performance. It also didn't share information about a DRAM supplier, likely meaning these are DRAM-less SSDs.

It isn't clear if these China-produced SSDs will ever come to the U.S. market, though it does seem unlikely. Given China's preferential treatment of indigenous manufacturers, these SSDs will likely be confined to the China market. Longsys currently sells its Foresee SSDs and Lexar products (bought from Micron in 2017) in the U.S., including USB flash drives, SSDs, memory cards, and embedded memory products.

Razer's Chroma lighting and its Synapse program go hand-in-hand, but soon there will be another way to control Razer's RGB lights: Amazon Alexa. At CES in Las Vegas, the company announced that the voice assistant will be able to control gaming hardware with Razer Synapse 3. The feature will come to Razer Synpase 3 in Q2 in the U.S. and Canada (later in 2019 elsewhere), and those who connect to Alexa will see a module to enable it.

You don't need an Echo speaker, either. You'll be able to use Razer's headsets and microphones (Razer told me others might work, but its devices are "recommended") to control your PC's lighting, change profiles and adjust settings. And besides adjusting lighting, Alexa can still do most of the things hardware speakers do, like check the weather and answer questions.

At one point during my demo, a Razer rep asked Alexa to have Synapse throw a "Chroma party," in which music started blasting and the lights started dancing around.

Additionally, Razer showed off the growth of its Chroma Connected Devices program, which was announced last June, and how devices from 15 partners, including Thermaltake, MSI, G.Skill and AsRock can connect RGB software to Synapse to control all of your lights through Razer's software.

Since the start of Computex 2018, a number of companies have announced 512GB microSD cards, but the first product came from Integral Memory based in London back in January. Since then Adata, PNY, and now Lexar have unleashed products with the same capacity. But the new Lexar is different from the rest: it's the only product to gain A2 certification, making it the fastest available for running applications on your smartphone or tablet.

"Turning it up to two" just doesn't have a strong enough ring to it, but it's the equivalent to 11 when it comes to SD application performance, because the rating indicates that a product is capable of at least 4,000 read and 2,000 write IOPS. Here's what having an A2 certification entails:

"The Application Performance Class 2 (A2) is defined by SD Physical 6.0 specification. It makes SD memory card much higher performance than A1 performance by using functions of Command Queuing and Cache. Efficient flash memory management can be supported by Maintenance functions. Application Performance Class can be applied to UHS SDHC/SDXC Memory Card product family."

We broke the story of Lexar's acquisition last August, and since then the company has focused on building its brand and establishing a network of retail sellers. Its parent company, Longsys, is the largest buyer of Samsung flash memory and the largest SSD manufacturer in China. You probably don't recognize the Longsys name but you do know its products; it manufactures SSDs and SD-type products for the world's largest brands.

It's easy to see how the acquisition of Lexar, one of the most trusted brand names in the U.S., will play out over time with the backing of such a strong and diverse company behind the wheel. The company has a number of interesting products in the works that are just begging to be revealed.

Aside from the A2 certified microSD card, Lexar also announced a new high-speed USB portable SSD called the SL100 Pro. This drive reaches up to 850 MB/s sequential performance and will ship in capacities of 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB. The USB 3.1 Gen 2 drive features a small, yet sturdy enclosure that fits well in your shirt or jeans pocket with room to spare.

Today we learned that China-based Shenzhen Longsys Electronics Co., Ltd has acquired Lexar, a world leader in award-winning memory solutions.

In June, Micron announced it was killing off the retail brand to "focus on its increasing opportunities in higher value markets and channels." The announcement shocked many observers, because Lexar enjoyed a strong market position with 20 years of solid growth and a large network of distributors and retailers carrying the product line.

The Lexar portfolio includes memory cards, USB flash drives, readers, and storage drives for retail and OEM customers. The blog post by Jay Hawkins went on to say that Micron was exploring opportunities to sell all or part of the Lexar business. The post also said that Micron will continue to provide support through the transition.

Longsys is one of China's largest manufacturers of flash-based devices. The company specializes in manufacturing embedded memory, solid state drives, memory cards, and USB flash drives. The company has told Tom's Hardware on a number of occasions about its desire to enter the U.S. market.

Even without a retail presence in the U.S. market, the company kept an office in California and attended many industry trade shows. Its website boasts of 500 patent applications since being established in 1999. We also tested its Foresee S500 client SSD in November 2015 and, at the time, it was the only product shipping with Silicon Motion's SM2256 controller.

The company has mastered the art of multi-chip packaging (MCP). Above is one of the most radical SSDs we've ever tested, the SDP (SATA Disk in Package). Longsys calls the form factor Mini SDP, and as you can see, it's the size of a SATA power and data connector. The drive features 3D TLC NAND flash and a controller in a package that's only 1.23mm thick.

Neither Longsys nor Micron have revealed details about this acquisition, but we learned that it was overseen by Longsys General Manager and flash-industry veteran Mike Chen, who came to the company in December 2016 from Micron. (He also has previous experience from his time at Marvell and Supermicro.) We'll be on the lookout for more information.

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Specifications, Pricing, Warranty & Accessories

Micron announced its 16nm TLC flash in June 2015, and it's finally ready for prime time. Crucial, a Micron subsidiary, is the first with an SSD based on the new NAND, though the company trails its most notable competition with similar technology. Just because Micron's TLC is only now showing up doesn't mean it's better, though.

For months, rumors swirled about the state of Micron's TLC. When Adata released its SP550 with SK Hynix 16nm TLC memory, we started to wonder if the whispers were true. Now we know. Crucial's BX200 can only claim 66,000 random read IOPS with the new 16nm TLC flash. Adata's 480GB SP550 (its review will go live soon) musters 75,000. And SK Hynix flash is generally slower than everyone else's. We already tested a Longsys Foresee S100 240GB with Toshiba A19 TLC and measured 75,000 random read IOPS. All three drives use the same Silicon Motion SM2256 controller that we previewed a while back. In that article, we achieved 75,000 random read IOPS with older Samsung 19nm TLC flash. Notice a pattern?

This isn't the first time Micron's ONFi-attached flash came up short compared to Toggle-mode NAND from the competition. In fact, the performance gap has grown between the two interfaces since the 2x-nanometer era (2010). But Micron's response typically leads to good results for enthusiasts. You can go back and track large price drops to two events: Black Friday, when SSDs get cheaper and stay that way, and when Micron transitions to a new manufacturing process. The company's triple-level-cell flash is still 16nm. However, 16nm TLC is smaller than an MLC-based die on the same process. I pressed Crucial for specifics, but came up short. It's safest to assume that TLC should be around one-third smaller than MLC.

Specifications

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Crucial's BX series is its entry-level line; for the first time, we heard the company use it in a talk about replacing hard drives with SSDs. The BX200 will succeed the BX100, which is being phased out rapidly. The new entry-level drive will surface in three capacities, starting at 240GB. Crucial no longer feels the 128GB capacity class is realistic for upgrades, since reduced parallelization severely limits performance.

All three BX200s employ Silicon Motion's SM2256 controller. Crucial uses a custom firmware co-developed with SMI. Interestingly, performance is the same across capacities. Sequential reads are rated at 540 MB/s, while writes land at 490 MB/s. Random read IOPS are claimed to be 66,000, while writes jump to 78,000 as a result of the dynamic SLC program cache.

The BX200 supports DevSlp, an ultra-low power mode most useful in the mobile space. These drives can drop to just 10mW and then wake up quickly. Although hardware encryption is not supported, we rarely hear anyone complain about its absence outside of businesses that require it.

Price & Warranty

In our talks with Micron, we were all but guaranteed the quoted MSRPs wouldn't hold for long. The BX200s are expected to sell for prices comparable with many other well-known SSDs. Getting them to stand out will necessitate heavy cuts in time for Black Friday. As it sits now, the 960GB BX200 should go for $300. The 480GB and 240GB models cost $150 and $85, respectively.

They're all covered by a three-year limited warranty capped at 72 terabytes written. The TBW rating is less than half of what you get from Samsung's 850 EVO. 

Accessories

The BX100 didn't come with anything except a 7mm-to-9.5mm adapter. Crucial's BX200 raises the bar, including access to Acronis True Image for cloning existing drives and the company's Storage Executive software (now standard with all Crucial SSDs). 

It's hard to believe that Storage Executive exposes so many features, given its relative youth. It was just released last January and is already up to version 3.24. Somewhere along the line, Crucial updated the software with a DRAM cache function called Momentum Cache, similar to Samsung's Rapid Mode and Plextor's PlexTurbo. This is what Crucial says about the feature:

Micron's Momentum Cache is an intelligent software driver that dynamically leverages unused system resources to enhance burst performance on supported Micron and Crucial solid-state drives (SSDs) in Windows operating systems. Momentum Cache is not restricted by SATA bus throughput limitations; instead, it uses additional DRAM bandwidth to achieve increased burst performance.

A new feature for version 3.24 lets you configure over-provisioning for enhanced endurance and performance. With more space reserved, random write performance increases. Endurance improves as well due to better flash management. Latency may even drop under the right conditions.

A Closer Look

The BX200 ships in a retail package with fast facts about what's inside, the warranty and a summarized feature set. All of Crucial's retail SSDs ship in similar packaging.

You also get the expected 7mm-to-9.5mm bracket and a paper with the code for Acronis, as well as the download link.

Physically, the drive is almost identical to the BX100, with the same enclosure and dimensions. Its 7mm design fits in Ultrabooks requiring the slimmer chassis. Unfortunately, the case material is not as robust as what Crucial uses to build the MX200 SSDs.

The BX200 960GB uses sixteen NAND flash packages. This maximizes the CE to the 4-channel SM2256 controller. 

The controller from Silicon Motion is labeled SM2256G. The letter on the end is different than the other drives we've tested. We have a few SM2256-based SSDs in the review queue, and those all ship with the SM2256X. We asked SMI what the X indicates and were told it’s the general SM2256 controller. We have yet to hear back what the G designation specifies.

The 960GB model has two DRAM packages for buffering page table data. The other two capacities use a single package. This is our first look at Micron’s 16nm TLC memory. The 960GB BX200 uses Micron’s highest-capacity package, 512Gb or 64GB. According to a Micron document, these are in production, while the lower-capacity modules are sampling and not in production. Performance for the package is rated at 333 MT/s.

Four-Corner Testing

Before we get started with our standard suite, let's first look at the native sequential write speed of Micron's 16nm TLC memory. This test uses 64KB blocks across the entire LBA range. On the far left, we get a blip of the emulated SLC buffer's performance. That should give you an idea just how small the reserved area is on an empty drive. As soon as you move away from it, the TLC flash's performance is clarified.

The 480GB BX200's TLC NAND writes at just over 64 MB/s. The 960GB BX200 fares identically. This isn't steady state sequential write performance either; we're just working outside of the buffer.

To compare this with other TLC-based architectures, Samsung's 500GB 850 EVO facilitates 445 MB/s, SK Hynix's 16nm TLC hits 96 MB/s paired with the same SMI SM2256 controller and Toshiba A19 (also matched up with the SM2256) manages 81 MB/s. Our result with the Toshiba A19 was in a 240GB drive benefiting from less parallelism than the BX200s we're testing today, too. Sadly, Micron's native sequential write performance is less than what you get from many hard drives.

Sequential Read

Despite their triple-level-cell flash, today's SATA-attached SSDs manage incredible sequential read speeds that often get capped by their 6Gb/s bus. Crucial's 480GB BX200 isn't a stellar performer at a queue depth of one, though, falling well behind the best models in our chart of low-cost SSDs. The 960GB BX200 fares a bit better.

At high queue depths, all of the drives appear fairly similar. But most of us can't stress our SSDs that way; low queue depth results consequently become more valuable.

Sequential Write

Low sequential write performance and the bursty emulated SLC combine to cause some issues with our test, which incorporates light conditioning and a fair amount of data on the drive. We could smooth out the results with heavier conditioning that would force the drives into steady state. But that wouldn't represent the way most of use mainstream SSDs.

The waves are indicative of weak cache algorithms. There just isn't enough buffer available, and it can't flush fast enough to hide the native performance of Micron's TLC memory. The one drive that can is Samsung's 850 EVO with 3D V-NAND. Even enthusiasts would have a hard time running up against native TLC flash performance on that SSD.

Crucial's 480GB BX200, the appropriate comparison against other 512GB-class repositories, struggles to keep pace with many of its competitors.

Random Read

The 480GB BX200 delivers the weakest random read performance at a queue depth of one. It scales well enough as the queue increases. However, such a low starting point gives us reason to worry. After all, random performance is what makes your computer feel fast, and it's closely related to latency.

Crucial should probably worry as well. Last week, Phison released an update to its partners capable of enabling 10,000 random read IOPS. We've waited nine months to get our hands on it. And there are several inexpensive Phison S10-based SSDs out there that could benefit.

Random Write

All of the TLC memory-based drives (except Samsung's 850 EVO) land along the lower random write performance line through the first chart, where we measure across queue depths. The 480GB BX200 is nearly isolated from even the low-performance drives until a queue depth of 16, where it doesn't really matter. You would have to go back to SATA 3Gb/s products to see a client drive from a major manufacturer with random write performance this meager at low queue depths.

Mixed Workload & Steady State

80 Percent Sequential Mixed Workload

The mixed workload results are more definitive than the 100 percent read and write tests. Rarely will you ever just read or just write data without mixing up the operations. According to an Intel document we have, an 80% read workload represents normal client use. So, we stick to that for measuring our blended test.

Again, the 480GB BX200 lands at the low end of our chart, with the SLC buffer causing performance variability.

80 Percent Random Mixed Workload

Mixed random data yields similar results from the 480GB BX200, and the 960GB drive posts numbers that look a lot like the lower-capacity drives we tested.

Sequential Steady State

Our mixed sequential steady state tests tell us a lot about performance when the drives are nearly full. Without a lot of spare area to keep cells clean, the drive must perform more read/modify/write cycles. Nearly all of the TLC-based drives lose a lot of sequential write performance.

Random Write Steady State

While combing through the results, I looked at our random steady state numbers and was shocked to see the BX200 writing 4KB data at rates as low as 300 IOPS. We have 7200 RPM mechanical disks in the lab that fare better. None of us will ever get an SSD into steady state using random operations, but we use this metric to evaluate a drive's suitability in RAID. If the line is steady across the x-axis, there's less variation under load. Needless to say, though, Crucial's BX200 isn't a good choice for your next array.

Real-World Software Performance Testing

We didn’t have time to run both BX200 drives with Momentum Cache in the PCMark 8 Advanced Storage Tests and notebook battery life test.

The BX200s had a hard time making it though the heavy portion of the test (they hung around the 50 MB/s mark). Momentum Cache helped, but it isn't able to spin a different performance story under taxing workloads. Really, the drive wasn't designed for heavy workloads.

Unfortunately, it doesn't fare any better under moderate use either. Though Momentum Cache augments performance here as well, it only allows the 960GB BX200 to compete with OCZ's 480GB Trion 100. And it's not like the Trion 100 is a measuring stick for great SSDs. The Samsung 850 EVO holds that title in the low-cost space, and it's nearly three times faster in part of the test.

Total Access Time

The access time tests really tell the story. Even with Momentum Cache enabled, the BX200 lags behind the other drives. Without the DRAM cache feature, the latency is painful.

Latency Histogram

This set of charts is something we've worked on over the last year, but haven't displayed yet. They show the latency buckets in an 80% read mixed workload with 4KB data at a queue depth of one. We want to see more red (0 to 50us) and black (50 to 100uS) area. Blue (100 to 200uS) and beyond is bad.

The chart illustrates why Samsung's 850 EVO is such a good product and why the 480GB BX200 is its polar opposite.

Notebook Battery Life

We measure SSD power consumption differently than other sites. Instead of looking at four-corner power modes, we use BAPCo MobileMark 2012.5 with real-world software and a notebook. Outside of when it's actually being utilized, most of an SSD's power consumption is related to garbage collection and other background flash management activities.

Controllers take a couple of approaches to these tasks. Some start the clean-up process right after new data goes to the flash. Others wait until a defined amount of cleaning is needed, then wipe the cells at once. This consumes more power than heavy reads and nearly as much power as a 4KB random write test. Because of when it all happens, though, most reviews miss it. By recording across several hours using powerful software, we're able to capture a drive's behavior more accurately.

Unfortunately, we had very little time between receiving our BX200 sample and Crucial's embargo, so we could only test one capacity point. We chose the 480GB model, since it's compared to other 512GB-class SSDs. It fell towards the bottom of the drives tested today, though the result is still good on our Lenovo notebook. Just be aware that Adata's SP550 with the same controller and SK Hynix TLCmemory performed better.

Conclusion

We didn't tackle this conclusion until all of our tests with Momentum Cache finished. It turns out that the DRAM cache doesn’t improve real-world performance enough for the BX200 to catch its low-cost SSD competition. Even with the cache enabled, performance only goes up to match some of the slowest drives available. Because of that, this goes down as one of the most disappointing SSDs introduced since 2008, when early JMicron DRAM-less controllers suffered the stutter fiasco. I really just can’t understand how Crucial tested this drive in-house and decided to release the BX200 in its current form.

We used our new low-cost SSD charts today, so we didn’t even compare the BX200 to the best-performing SATA drives available. Many of those only cost $20 to $30 more at the 512GB capacity point. Even though Crucial told us that its MSRP probably won't hold for long, it’s the only pricing we have. At its suggested retail price, the BX200 is not competitive with any SSD sold today. Adata's SP550 costs less, uses the same controller and has faster SK Hynix 16nm TLC flash.

For the BX200 to compete, its price has to fall below the SP550. I wouldn't buy the Crucial drive if its price was within 15 percent of the Adata.

Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.

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It's not all laptops at IFA (though it might seem like it given the barrage we've seen in the last 24 hours). Lexar is offering a bit of variety with the announcement of a brand new microSDXC card.

Dubbed the Lexar High-Performance microSDXC UHS-I card, this little guy boasts read transfer speeds of up to 600x (that's 90 MB per second). With a capacity of 64 GB, Lexar says users will be able to capture, store, play back and transfer up to eight hours of 1080p full-HD video. This calculation is based on HD 1080p at 24fps. It'll come with a USB 3.0 reader to facilitate high-speed file transfer (backwards compatible to USB 2.0) and a lifetime warranty (though the reader only has a one-year warranty).

"Over the past decade, mobile technologies including smartphones, tablets, and action video cameras have become an integral part of everyday life – and new capabilities are continually being added to enhance these technologies. Mobile devices offer convenience for business and personal needs, as well as the ability to capture those special, every day moments," said Adam Kaufman, product marketing manager, Lexar. "The Lexar High-Performance microSDXC UHS-I card provides users with a premium mobile solution that allows them to spend less time offloading their increasingly large files and more time capturing those important moments while they're on the go."

Retail price is set at $99.99, though it hasn't shown up on Amazon just yet, and Lexar's own site lists it as 'coming soon.'

Follow Jane McEntegart @JaneMcEntegart. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

California-based Lexar on Tuesday introduced its High-Performance microSDHC UHS-I and microSDXC UHS-I memory cards for smartphones, tablets, and sports camcorders. These cards carry a Class 10 speed classification, and deliver read transfer speeds up to 300x, or rather, a speedy 45 MB per second. Lexar said the cards are design for "adventure seekers" and "adrenaline junkies".

"These cards enable outdoor enthusiasts to capture up to eight hours of their greatest moments in HD and share it with friends faster," the company said. "Users can also store up to 24,800 photos or 14,200 songs, and when paired with the included USB 3.0 reader, get fast transfer rates from their memory card to their PC or Mac computer."

As indicated, both cards come with a USB 3.0 reader that enables users to quickly play back and transfer their favorite media files. The microSDHC UHS-I card comes in a 32 GB capacity whereas the microSDXC UHS-I offers 64 GB of storage space. Both come with a limited lifetime warranty, and the USB 3.0 reader has its own one-year limited warranty.

Wes Brewer, vice president, products and technology for Lexar, said that the design of Lexar's new 64 GB microSDXC card was made possible by utilizing Micron’s newest, 64-Gbit, 20-nm process technology NAND flash memory.

"Together with creative die-stacking techniques and uniquely engineered firmware in our UHS-I capable controller, Lexar was able to design and produce this product at the 300x performance level to meet the needs of our customers," he said. "Our total High-Performance retail solution – which includes an ultra-compact USB 3.0 microSD high-speed reader – achieves an optimal blend of price and performance demanded by our retail customers that focus on video capture and quick file offloading to a PC and the Internet."

In its announcement on Tuesday, Lexar said that it works with major mobile device manufacturers to ensure that its cards are compatible with their devices. Lexar's memory designs also undergo extensive testing in the Lexar Quality Labs to ensure performance, quality, compatibility, and reliability with more than 800 digital devices.

Lexar High-Performance microSDHC UHS-I and microSDXC UHS-I memory cards will be available for purchase in November for $69.99 (32 GB) and $139.99 (64 GB) from Lexar.com and leading e-tail outlets worldwide.

_{Contact Us for News Tips, Corrections and Feedback}

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microSDHC Cards For Mobile Devices

Fast memory cards are needed not only in professional equipment like DSLR cameras, but they're increasingly being used in consumer devices like compact cameras, camcorders, MP3 players, hand-held game consoles, and cell phones, too. This accelerating uptake is caused by the rapidly increasing number of features of these devices. The more features, the higher the demands on the memory card. For example, consider recording and playing back HD video on a smartphone. For stutter-free operation, significant data transfer speeds are required. In order to go beyond video snippets a few seconds long, the storage capacity of a memory card also needs to be sufficiently large.

Considering those criteria and adding compatibility, reliability, and robustness, the SD card quickly emerges as the memory card of choice, which also helps to explain its 80% market share.

The physically smallest variant of the SD card is the microSD card, measuring a mere 11 mm x 15 mm x 1 mm (0.43” x 0.59” x 0.04”). Add a host adapter, and a microSD or microSDHC card can be used like a SDHC card.

For this comparison test, we're focusing on the microSDHC subcategory of the microSD form factor, which offers much larger capacities, and thus more versatility in multimedia applications. While a microSD card tops out at 2 GB due to its FAT16 file system, a microSDHC card can store up to 32 GB on its FAT32 file system, depending on the model.

We asked all major memory card manufacturers to submit samples of their microSDHC-based products. We received a wide range of cards, with capacities ranging from 4 GB to 32 GB, and thus covering the whole range of the microSDHC specification. We also noticed plenty of different performance points. SD cards are grouped into several performance classes, which denote the minimum recording rate of the cards. The lowest performance class, Class 2, stores data at a minimum of 2 MB/s. Our test candidates, however, start at performance Class 4, which features a worst-case write speed of 4 MB/s. Class 6 cards achieve at least 6 MB/s, while Class 10 cards switch up the rating a bit, pushing 10 MB/s non-fragmented sequential writes.

Adata microSDHC Class 6 (Class 6, 8/16 GB)

Taiwan-based Adata offers a wide range of memory products, ranging from RAM and USB sticks to SSDs and memory cards. For this test, we received two Class 6 microSDHC cards: an 8 GB card and a 16 GB card. Adata also offers a 4 GB model, but does not include an adapter with any of its cards. Adata places no restrictions on the use of the cards and recommends them for all mobile devices, claiming full compatibility to the SDHC spec.

Adata's microSDHC Class 6 cards feature a life-long warranty and claim up to 20 MB/s read speed and up to 9 MB/s write speed, which is very close to what we measured. The 16 GB version achieves 18.6 MB/s sequential reads and 10 MB/s writes, exceeding the manufacturer’s claims with that latter figure.

The 8 GB card shows a read speed of 18.2 MB/s, almost as fast as its larger brother, but excels in writes: 12.1 MB/s is not only significantly faster than the larger card, but other benchmarks show that the 8 GB card is one of the fastest Class 6 cards, whereas the 16 GB card is a more or less a mid-range card.

Kingston microSDHC Card (Class 10, 4/8/16 GB)

Memory specialist Kingston offers microSDHC cards in the Class 4 and Class 10 categories. Our three test candidates, capable of storing 4, 8, and 16 GB, belong to the latter group.

Kingston also offers a Class 10 card able to hold 32 GB, but did not send us a sample. Kingston advertises compatibility with the SD 2.00 card spec and offers a lifetime warranty. We appreciate that Kingston includes a host adapter, which allows using microSDHC cards in SHDC card readers.

Kingston conservatively claims 10 MB/s write performance, which is the minimum for Class 10. Our benchmarks show that the 16 GB card especially is quite fast. While it matches both of the smaller Kingston cards in sequential read speed, it bests them in nearly all other benchmarks. This is particularly evident in the sequential write benchmark, where the 16 GB card achieves 19.2 MB/s, while both of the other Kingston cards only demonstrate a measly 9.5 MB/s. The two lower-capacity Kingston cards wind up in the lower average of the 15-card field, but the 16 GB model is definitely one of the fastest cards.

Lexar High-Speed Mobile microSDHC Card (Class 6, 16 GB And Class 10, 32 GB)

Lexar segments its memory card product range, which consists of microSDHC cards, SD cards, Compact Flash cards, and Memory Stick cards, into application categories like photo, video, gaming, and mobile devices. The microSDHC cards belong to the latter category and are referred to as High-Speed Mobile microSDHC. We tested the largest two models, which belong to different classes. The 32 GB flagship model belongs to Class 10 and the 16 GB model is labeled Class 6. Lexar offers 10-year warranties on both and includes a USB card reader.

Lexar's website does not divulge performance data other than the class rating. But there is no need to be apprehensive about what these products can achieve, as both of them perform admirably, falling into the upper mid-range.

The 16 GB card achieves 18.6 MB/s sequential read speeds, which is the best performance within the class. Its write speed is 10.2 MB/s. We expected (and realized) even more performance from the 32 GB Class 10 card: sequential read and write rates of 21.3 and 21.4 MB/s, respectively. These values, however, do not top the speed king, SanDisk's Mobile Ultra.

MemoryStar microSDHC Card (Class 6, 16 GB And Class 10, 8/16 GB)

MemoryStar offers a palette of microSDHC cards in Class 2, 4, 6, and 10 trim, covering every base mentioned in the SD 2.00 specification. The company sells models between 4 GB and 32 GB. Each sports a 10-year warranty and an SDHC adapter is included. We received three cards: one Class 6 card (16 GB) and two Class 10 cards able to store 8 and 16 GB.

Our benchmarks predictably show a performance gap between the Class 6 and Class 10 cards. More so here than with the other vendors, however, the gap is really pretty significant. On one hand, the two Class 10 cards are equally fast (aside from a few discrepancies attributable to measurement tolerances). These two cards are among the fastest cards tested, achieving 21.6 MB/s sequential reads and 21.5 MB/s sequential writes, outclassing the competition.

In stark contrast to that, the MemoryStar Class 6 card is not only significantly slower than its Class 10 siblings, but even trails the other Class 6 cards in most respects. The only exception to this general trend is sequential write performance, which is acceptable at 12.6 MB/s. In sequential read tests, however, the card trails all other Class 6 cards by moving 13.1 MB/s.

Patriot LX Series microSDHC (Class 10, 16 GB)

Patriot offers a wide range of memory cards in various formats. The company has also established its reputation as a manufacturer of SSD drives. Its portfolio of microSDHC cards ranges from Class 2 to 10, and from 4 to 32 GB. Patriot sent us a LX-series card, rated for Class 10 performance and capable of holding 16 GB of information. It comes with a SDHC host adapter.

In our benchmarks, the Patriot card establishes itself as a respectable mid-range product that does not exhibit any particular weaknesses. However, it's not a performance leader, as sequential read speeds of 20.8 MB/s fall at the trailing end of its class. While sequential write performance of up to 12.2 MB/s is still quite good, it's really only modest compared to faster Class 10 cards from Kingston and MemoryStar.

SanDisk microSDHC (Class 4, 8 GB) And Mobile Ultra microSDHC (Class 4, 16 GB)

The US-based manufacturer SanDisk is, according to its press releases, the largest manufacturer of flash-based products in the world. Befitting this position, SanDisk offers a complete portfolio of memory cards. The company presents the microSDHC cards on its site’s Mobile Memory section, aiming them at owners of smartphones.

The Mobile Ultra microSDHC card is intended for transferring files between a mobile phone and a PC, which is why it comes with a USB card reader. We tested both the 8 GB SanDisk microSDHC card and the 16 GB SanDisk Mobile Ultra microSDHC. According to the manufacturer, both are Class 4 products.

Class 4 is a real understatement for the Mobile Ultra microSDHC model. Defying its designation, our test sample ran rings around many of the Class 10 cards and exhibited good to excellent read and write performance in all benchmarks. Clocking in at 22.8 MB/s, it even took the lead in our sequential read test. However, it is not quite as fast in the sequential write benchmark, achieving 15.8 MB/s. The card also demonstrates very strong random read and write performance, again winning first place in these categories.

The 8 GB SanDisk microSDHC cannot quite live up to the results demonstrated by its fast Mobile Ultra brother. It really is a Class 4 card, clocking in at 11.6 MB/s sequential reads and 6.1 MB/s sequential writes. Compared to other Class 4 cards, it is fairly slow. Interestingly, the Class 4 Silicon Power microSDHC memory card exhibits precisely the same speed in all benchmarks.

Samsung microSDHC Plus 8 GB (Class 6, 8 GB)

According to Samsung, its microSDHC Plus card can survive 24 hours immersed in water. It can withstand a load of up to 1.6 tons. It can tolerate shocks. And it can purportedly weather radiation and endure magnetic fields of up to 10 000 Gauss. Being a Class 6 card, it should also perform reasonably well. Samsung bundles an SDHC adapter with this card.

In our benchmarks, Samsung's microSDHC Plus 8 GB performs modestly. Its sequential read performance hits 17.6 MB/s, which is almost on par with the Class 6 candidates from Adata and Lexar. Sequential write performance is competitive at 11.8 MB/s, putting this model in the middle of the pack.

Silicon Power microSDHC Memory Card (Class 4, 32 GB)

Silicon Power covers everything from Class 2 to 10 with its lineup of microSDHC cards. The company also offers capacities between 4 to 32 GB. For the purposes of this round-up, we received a 32 GB Class 4 card.

None of Silicon Power's documentation advertises maximum speeds. Like most competing products, this 32 GB card comes with an SDHC adapter, too.

All of our 15 test candidates achieve speeds that exceed the minimum performance level of their respective class designations. Case in point, Silicon Power's microSDHC card achieves 11.7 MB/s in sequential reads and 5.9 MB/s in sequential writes. Still, that's rather slow compared to other Class 4 cards.

As a side note, SanDisk's microSDHC offering shows the very same performance values in all benchmarks.

Comparison Table And Test Configuration

Test System

Benchmark Results: Throughput

Rather homogenously, the tested microSDHC cards achieve sequential read speeds closely matching their speed class. At the lower end, there are two Class 4 cards, followed by five Class 6 cards that perform very similarly with the notable exception of MemoryStar's microSDHC card. Fortunately for North American customers, that product isn't available here, so you don't have to worry about it.

A similarly coherent picture emerges from the seven Class 10 cards. The speed difference between the fastest and the slowest Class 10 model is only 1.5 MB/s.

The big surprise from this test is the SanDisk Mobile Ultra microSDHC, which takes the performance crown with its 22.8 MB/s sequential read speed in spite of being labeled Class 4.

The sequential write benchmark is dominated by both Class 10 MemoryStar cards, which are in a performance category of their own (but unavailable in the U.S.). Only the Kingston 16 GB card can come close to keeping up. The bulk of our review samples, however, exhibit write performance between 10 and 12 MB/s.

Benchmark Results: Random Reads And Writes

Random reads of 512 KB blocks yield the very same ranking as sequential reads. Once again, the SanDisk Mobile Ultra microSDHC is the fastest card at 21.8 MB/s.

Reducing the block size for the random read test to 4 KB significantly impacts performance, which tops out at a mere 3.4 MB/s, achieved by the Samsung and Adata Class 6 cards. There is almost no difference between queue depths of one and 32 when it comes to memory cards.

Randomly writing 512 KB blocks is not a strong suit for microSDHC cards. The three cards that perform best are the SanDisk Mobile Ultra microSDHC, the Adata microSDHC Class 6, and the Samsung card.

Benchmarking random 4 KB writes yields a rather pathetic picture, with the throughput of all but two test candidates dropping to zero-point-zero-something MB/s. In other words, that's just a few KB/s. Only the SanDisk microSDHC card and the Silicon Power card stand out with a queue depth of one. Unfortunately, that's still just over 1 MB/s.

Which microSDHC Card Is Right For You?

All of the microSDHC cards we tested perform as their vendors advertise. As a result, prospective buyers can be confident in the performance each of these models delivers. 

The packaging tells you what class within the SD 2.0 specification your favorite card belongs to, indicating the minimum data transfer rate you can expect from it. We did not find a single performance disappointment. To the contrary, we found one sleeper. Although it's advertised as a Class 4 card, SanDisk's Mobile Ultra microSDHC matches the performance of the Class 10 cards we tests, going so far as to win the sequential read speed metric.

Only few manufacturers ship microSDHC cards without accessories. A SDHC adapter, which allows you to read the microSDHC card in a SDHC card reader, is included with nine of the 15 tested cards. Comparatively rare are USB readers, which are included with both Lexar cards and the SanDisk Mobile Ultra microSDHC. You'll predominantly come across USB readers when buying microSDHC cards that are not exclusively intended for mobile devices, but also for data exchange with a PC. However, none of the 15 tested cards include both adapters. The other extreme, no accessories at all, is rare: only the Adata cards and the other SanDisk model do not include any adapter at all.

High-Speed And High-Capacity SD Memory Cards Tested

SD memory cards have been on the market since late 2001, and nowadays they can be considered the storage backbone for the entire consumer electronics market. Devices like GPS units, tablet PCs, and digital cameras rely on SD memory cards.

It’s certainly appropriate to call SD cards the medium of our digital life when we're away from the PC, and we decided to look at some of the latest offerings for advanced users.

There are several reasons to revisit popular SD memory card products every once in a while. The capacities of these products shouldn't be an issue, as memory cards always provide the storage space for which they're rated. In other words, they don't suffer from the same sort of mislead marketing that we've seen from some SSD vendors. If they do, then they are typically broken, incorrectly partitioned, or improperly formatted. You will see them same variance due to binary conversion once you plug a card into a reader device and the operating system treats 1 KB as 1024 bytes (known as 1 KiB), since vendors still typically advertise 1 KB as 1000 bytes. This is normal, though.

However, performance can differ quite a bit. Last decade, SD cards maxed out at only a few megabytes per second. Today’s products cover everything between 5 MB/s and more than 60 MB/s, which means that, more than ever, it's important to choose the right SD card for your intended purpose.

Depending on how you want to read to or write from your SD card, it is also very important to use a reader device that actually supports fast speeds. Many USB 2.0 multi-card readers top out somewhere between 20 MB/s and the typical bottleneck of USB 2.0, which is realistically around 32-35 MB/s. If you want to really utilize 30+ MB/s of bandwidth, then you need a USB 3.0 card reader. As a side note, relying on a card reader built-in to your PC or notebook doesn't mean you're working around that USB 2.0-imposed limit, as most integrated devices actually employ USB 2.0.

For most folks, it's probably not as important to have the fastest SD memory hardware as it is to own a capable processor and graphics card. However, we want to make clear that the cost difference between average performance and great performance in this segment can be quite minimal. Let’s say you are going to invest in a decent 32 GB memory card and a suitable card reader. That combination is going to cost $50-70 anyway. Wouldn't you want to spend an extra $10 to transfer pictures from your digital SLR in half the time? We would.

SD Memory Card Performance And Standards

We’re dealing with full-sized SD flash memory cards in this piece. These measure 32 x 24 x 2.1 mm, and they currently store up to 128 GB of data. There are many vendors and various speed classifications, but they all operate within the SD card memory standards SD 1.1, SD 2.0, or SD 3.0.

You typically find speed ratings like 133x or 300x printed on most of the products or product boxes. These are comparisons to the single-speed data transfer speeds of the good old CD-ROM. A 1x transfer rate is equivalent to 1.2 Mb/s or 150 KB/s.

Effectively, a 400x SD memory card can theoretically reach 400 * 0.15 MB/s, or 60 MB/s.

Don’t be blinded by these numbers though, as they typically reflect peak performance capabilities and do not reflect everyday throughput. To make matters worse, most vendors refer to read performance numbers and hide away the fact that the large majority of SD cards deliver much lower write performance.

The initial SD cards compliant with revision 1.1 of the SD spec were limited to 2 GB, which is why SDHC (SD 2.0) was introduced to enable capacities of up to 32 GB. In addition to capacity, the SD 2.0 specification also provides performance classification to guarantee certain minimum throughput. There are four classes in the spec: Class 2, Class 4, Class 6, and Class 10. The number tells you the minimum transfer speeds in MB/s that can be sustained by the memory card.

We find that the Class ratings are more useful than the CD-ROM-based multiplier rating, as equivalent MB/s throughput is guaranteed and usually even exceeded by many SD cards. Speed ratings are important if you want to use your memory card on devices that require a certain minimum bandwidth, such as HD camcorders and digital SLR cameras. Once you want to store photos in RAW and JPEG mode, you need a fast memory card to support continuous shooting at several pictures per second.

The SD 3.0 (also known as SDXC) specification provides a ceiling of up to 2 TB. Although there are only a few SD memory cards with up 64 GB of capacity available, the SDXC standard also includes the modified UHS-I specification (Ultra HighSpeed I), supporting up to 104 MB/s. This is the successor to the High-Speed Bus I/F (Class 10) and Normal Bus I/F (Class 2, 4, 6), and it is the basis for products that can deliver more serious bandwidth. Be sure that any card reader you choose works with SDXC cards, as you cannot fully exploit SDXC cards with SDHC card readers.

Other Formats

In addition to conventional SD cards, you'll also find miniSD and microSD cards on the market. Those are well-suited to mobile devices like smartphones. They max out at 32 GB and they are electrically compatible with conventional SD cards, meaning that simple adapters allow you to access them. The miniSD form factor measures 20 x 21.5 x 1.4 mm. However, miniSD has never been very popular, and is on its way to disappear soon. The industry is either using SD or microSD.

microSD cards only measure 11 x 15 x 1.0 mm and are even smaller than a GSM cell phone SIM card. These are increasingly popular, as most smartphone designs utilize microSD cards as flexible storage. We currently find microSD cards at up to 32 GB, and it’s only a matter of time until they're also available at higher capacities. However, only few microSD cards deliver performance that is anywhere near the throughput we find on the devices tested in this article.

USB 3.0 Card Reader: Pretec P240

Once we decided to round up the latest high-speed SDXC cards, we also started looking for an equivalent card reader. In other words, it had to be fast. This was in late February, and the only device we found was Pretec's USB 3.0 multi-card reader. We were pretty disappointed when we realized that, even today, there are very few fast card readers available on the market. Are we the only ones who want to work with SD cards at speeds faster than 30 MB/s? Surely not.

It would also be nice to use card reader devices that directly connect to SATA. More and more motherboards support 6 Gb/s speeds. And even older 3 Gb/s ports wouldn't bottleneck fast memory cards.

The Pretec P240 is available through a few merchants worldwide, and it supports all of the usual standards, including microSD, MMC, MSCX, MS, M2, and CF. We used the h2benchw benchmark to look at the fastest possible throughput with today’s SD cards. Testing Kingston’s Ultimate XX card, we measured almost 80 MB/s. That's not too bad for an SD memory card.

However, this doesn’t actually give us a good read on the Pretec P240’s real-world speed limit. It only tells us that the combination of the latest Kingston card with this particular reading device can squeeze out a modest peak bandwidth. It remains to be seen what future cards and readers can do. The test also shows us that many SDHC cards are limited to to something around 24 MB/s on this reader device. Some of these performance numbers are actually higher than when we benchmarked cards for our last roundup. Therefore, we can conclude that a fast and modern card reader may very well accelerate throughput for existing SD card products.

The only exception is SanDisk’s Extreme Card (SDHC, 16 GB, Class 10). In the last review, we benchmarked this one using SanDisk’s own SD card reader, which helped this card reach almost 27 MB/s. On the Pretec P240, we measured 23 MB/s.

Kingston Ultimate XX (8, 16, 32 GB)

Kingston’s Ultimate XX is a state-of-the-art SDHC card that employs the UHS-I bus interface, allowing it to reach more than 60 MB/s read throughput and up to 43 MB/s write speeds. These numbers tell us that this could be one of the fastest SD memory products on the market today. Since this is a SDHC product, you do not necessarily need an SDXC controller. But Kingston specifically says that the Ultimate XX complies to the SD 3.01 standard.

32 GB

The 32 GB version is the top model in Kingston’s Ultimate XX line. It currently sells for roughly $280 and is specified to reach 60 MB/s read speeds and 35 MB/s writes.

Our benchmarking confirms sequential reads as fast as 62.4 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark 3.0 and 36.7 MB/s sequential writes. We also use c’t magazine’s h2benchw benchmark to look at average and minimum transfer speeds. This benchmark returns 50.0 MB/s minimum read speed and a minimum of 12.3 MB/s on writes. However, average values are much higher.

16 GB

The 16 GB model happens to deliver slightly better performance than the 32 GB flagship. Although the differences are hardly worth mentioning, there are a few more megabytes per second of bandwidth here and there. The only exception is the peak performance, which is almost identical at 62.7 MB/s for reads and 38.4 MB/s writes. We found this card for roughly $130.

8 GB

Last but not least, we also received the 8 GB entry-level product for users who want good performance, but who do not necessarily require high capacities. The 8 GB card actually is the fastest SD card of the three when it comes to sequential writes, breaking the 40 MB/s barrier.

In sequential reads it also beats its larger brothers by 0.2 and 0.5 MB/s. However, minimum write througput may drop to 9.5 MB/s according to h2benchw. In exchange, this product is the fastest in our combined read and write test, reaching 20 MB/s, while the competition delivers a combined 7-18 MB/s read and write throughput using real data. The 8 GB card is available at less than $70.

In the end, Kingston’s Ultimate XX line only has one weakness, which is 512 KB random writes. While the three products range between 1.0 to 1.2 MB/s in this discipline, other cards deliver between 2 and 8.5 MB/s.

Lexar Professional 133x (16, 32 GB)

Memory specialist Lexar sent us two SD memory cards for this review, its Professional 133x with 32 GB and 16 GB capacity. Lexar does have a 128 GB SDXC card on its Web site, but it wasn't ready for review when we started collecting samples.

32 GB SDHC

The 32 GB Professional 133x is available for $120, which is acceptable considering the card’s positioning as a solution for digital photography and enthusiasts. Considering Kingston’s current pricing of $280, this is less than half the cost. In return, though, you also less than half of the performance.

The Professional 133x at 32 GB reaches 23 MB/s sequential read throughput, according to h2benchw and CrystalDiskMark 3.0. It is comparably weak as Kingston's Ultimate XX lineup in 512 KB random writes at only 0.8 MB/s, although this type of workload is unusual for SD memory cards. Sequential write speeds never drop below 14.1 MB/s, which is still a commendable result, despite the fact that the UHS-I cards from Kingston and SanDisk reach almost twice the peak write throughput. The card is not very convincing if you hammer I/O-intensive workloads through it, and it does not deliver very high throughput in combined reads and writes.

16 GB SDHC

The 16 GB model delivers similar performance as the 32 GB version. In has better combined read and write throughput (8 MB/s versus 7 MB/s) and slightly better I/O performance, but also a bit less throughput performance. These differences are not relevant, though. The card is well-suited to applications that require sequential operation, but it doesn't do well in random operations that involve a lot of write access.

PQI SDXC C10 (64 GB)

Taiwanese memory vendor PQI offers a 64 GB SD memory card product called the SDXC C10. The name is derived from the speed category, which is Class 10. This card proves that high-capacity SDXC cards do not have to be high-speed products. Kingston and SanDisk show the opposite, wielding plenty of speed, but more conventional capacities.

So far, this is the only true SDXC card that has reached our test lab, although more and more products are becoming available. The SDXC C10 delivers above-average performance in all benchmarks and is comparatively strong in the random write tests using 512 KB block sizes. Stepping down to 4 KB blocks reveals that you shouldn't run random write operations on a card like this (though the same applies to any of these SD-based products, which really aren't meant for such a workload). Combined read and write operation, in addition to I/O performance, aren't this card's strengths.

This product reaches its peak sequential performance at 22 MB/s for reads and 21.4 MB/s writes. It always maintains at least 12.9 MB/s, which is a modest result. Unfortunately, we haven’t found this card for purchase yet online, and we're disappointed that PQI sent in a piece of hardware that wasn't yet ready for worldwide availability.

SanDisk Extreme Pro (16 GB)

The SanDisk Extreme Pro is the second SD memory card that is based on the UHS-I standard, and it’s designed for DSLR cameras and HD camcorders. Therefore, our performance expectations are rather high. SanDisk states that the card reaches up to 45 MB/s (or 300x speed) for both reads and writes. Although we’ve seen more than 60 MB/s on Kingston’s card, 45 MB/s writes would be quite significant.

We received the 16 GB model for review, which can be considered the mainstream capacity for 2011. The card starts at roughly $70, making it much cheaper than the Kingston Ultimate XX. There is also a 32 GB version that starts at less than $140. An 8 GB version can be found at $33.

Benchmarking in h2benchw yields peak sequential read performance of 44.8 MB/s, whereas CrystalDiskMark 3.0 returns only 41.2 MB/s. The 42 MB/s sequential write maximum in h2benchw is state-of-the-art, although we found that the minimum transfer rate can drop significantly. Write throughput in CrystalDiskMark is 36.5 MB/s, making this card equivalent to Kingston’s Ultimate XX. SanDisk is also second fastest in 512 KB random reads. All other disciplines are typically average.

Comparison Table And Test Setup

Test Setup

Benchmark Results: Access Time And I/O Performance

Access time and I/O performance are hardly relevant on portable memory products, such as these SD cards. Access time, particularly, is low on the list of must-consult metrics. However, I/O performance may be of interest for a small fraction of our readers, as it is indeed possible to run a full system installation on an SD or CompactFlash memory card. Industrial PC designs and systems based on the smallest form factors are possible use cases.

Read access time is equally quick on all of the SD cards in the test bed...

...while write access time differs significantly. The slowest product, PQI’s SDXC C10 card, actually requires 1.37 seconds, on average, to commence write operation. Keep in mind that this doesn’t really impact users working with digital cameras. But the benchmark triggers multiple random access operations, which the cards oftentimes fail to respond to in a quick fashion.

Since these cards were designed to read and write data sequentially, they are not very impressive when it comes to performing random read/write operations at varying block sizes. Most of the SD cards are comparable to hard drives from somewhere around 1995. Only SanDisk’s Extreme shows reasonable performance.

The Web server I/O test pattern does not involve write operation, which is why all cards deliver 3-4x performance of a conventional 2.5” hard drive.

Benchmark Results: Random Read/Write

512 KB Random Read/Write

Random read operations using a 512 KB block size work rather well on all the cards, as 16.7 MB/s is the minimum performance we see. Kingston and SanDisk are the only two vendors that provided UHS-I cards. This becomes very obvious when looking at the results.

Random writes using the same 512 KB blocks requires way more time for these cards to organize and store data (read-modify-erase-write). This is not a typical application scenario, but it brings a few cards down and shows some others ahead.

4 KB Random Read/Write

Random read and write operations using 4 KB blocks result in more severe performance drops. You see 2.3-3.7 MB/s total bandwidth in random reads and only a few kilobytes per second in random writes.

Benchmark Results: Sequential Reads/Writes

This is the most important benchmark scenario for memory cards, as lots of data is either written sequentially onto the memory card by a digital camera or camcorder, or read from the SD card onto some other storage device.

More than 60 MB/s of read throughput from the Kingston Ultimate XX cards is very impressive, but SanDisk’s 41.2 MB/s is almost two times the throughput we’ve seen from typical Class 10 SDHC cards.

This chart makes it clear that you want a UHS-I device for the best performance, and that the SD 3.0 specification (SDXC) by itself does not mean you’ll get fast performance.

When it comes to sequential writes, the differences are smaller. On one hand, Kingston and SanDisk deliver very similar performance. On the other, throughput is less than 2x of what we’ve seen from other Class 6 and Class 10 cards.

Benchmark Results: Read/Write Throughput

H2benchw confirms the results we’ve seen in CrystalDiskMark 3.0, and it also helps to further break down performance. We see that the UHS-I cards not only improve peak performance, but also provide a significant increase to minimum transfer speeds. This might be even more important for everyday operation than impressive performance peaks.

The new UHS-I cards deliver significantly better peak and average write speeds, but they also drop to a bit more than 10 MB/s here and there. One card even slid to 800 KB/s speed during this test, which monopolizes each card's full storage capacity. This means that there is no guarantee that cards like SanDisk's Extreme Pro can actually maintain their performance levels at all times.

This is certainly not very important, as camcorders and digital SLR cameras work with internal buffers that can help mitigate performance bottlenecks. But it's worth considering this phenomenon. Users who don’t need 40 MB/s write speeds, but insist on the highest possible minimum transfer speeds, should still consider some of the more established (existing) products.

Benchmark Results: Combined Read/Write Throughput

This test scenario may not be entirely relevant, but it shows the cards’ ability to handle concurrent read and write operations. You might want to copy all of the existing photos from your SD memory card and, at the same time, write a few gigabytes of data to it.

First things first: the speed rating doesn’t tell you too much about an SD card’s ability to execute sequential read and write operations simultaneously. The new Kingston Ultimate XX cards do extremely well, but all other cards in the top third of the lineup don't have much in common.

The SanDisk Extreme does well. The newer Pro model is just above-average. And even other high-end products like Lexar's Professional 133x, a Class 10 card, don’t convince in this extraordinary discipline.

Conclusion

Users looking for a decent high-capacity and high-speed SD memory card for a consumer or semi-professional device can look at our sequential throughput results and base their purchasing decision on them with confidence.

We also benchmarked access time and I/O performance for the sake of completeness, and to get a better impression of the strengths and weaknesses each product brings to the table. What we find is that most cards are poor performers if they're asked to execute a lot of I/O operations, particularly if there are writes involved. Most cards also really fail at random writes with small block sizes. Fortunately, while SD cards can be utilized as flexible storage devices or even system drives in the smallest systems, we categorically recommend against using SD memory cards for anything except sequential read or write operations.

In this category we have a definite winner: Kingston’s Ultimate XX series is by far the most expensive, but also by far the fastest SD memory card product line on the market. It delivers more than 60 MB/s sequential reads and 45 MB/s sequential writes. This is as much as you can get today, and it significantly reduces the time to transfer digital photography data or HD movies from your camera.

Bear in mind, however, that you also have to purchase a fast USB 3.0 card reader in order to take advantage of Kingston's performance. Otherwise, you'd be just fine sticking with USB 2.0-based hardware and almost any of the SD cards presented in the benchmark section. Thanks to great performance for many different enthusiast-oriented consumer devices, the Ultimate XX family receives the Recommended Buy Award.

Users on a budget do have other options, though. Like the Kingston Ultimate XX cards, SanDisk’s Extreme Pro is also based on the UHS bus, which technically supports up to 104 MB/s maximum bandwidth for SD card products. The Extreme Pro does not get faster than 45 MB/s, but it reaches the same speeds in sequential writes.

Many of the other cards with Class 10 or Class 6 performance classification typically perform better than their corresponding 10 MB/s or 6 MB/s minimum rated speeds. The Lexar Professional series, SanDisk’s Extreme (not the Pro), and a few others may not reach more than 24 MB/s maximum read speed, but they still demonstrate write performance that is quick enough for most devices requiring fast SD card storage.

The card is rated at 133x speed, which translates to a data transfer bandwidth of about 20 MB/s.

What makes this card special is not just its price tag of about $700, but the fact that 128 GB capacity can be squeezed into a SD form factor. If you were to use the card to store 12 MP JPEG images, you would have enough room for 32,000 images - or about 17,000 21MP photos. Even if you store the data in uncompressed RAW format, there is space for 5200 uncompressed 21 MP RAW pictures.

The card can also be used for up to 36 hours of 1080p HD video or about 190 90 minute standard definition movies. Or you could install Windows 7 eight times.   

The capacity and the price is well beyond of the needs of the average consumer, but it is no secret that these capacities (the card will also be available as a 64 GB version for about $500) will trickle down into the consumer space. Conceivably, they could serve as the only portable mass storage device you really need - storage that can be shared between your digital camera, video camera and a PC such as a netbook.  

Class 6+ SDHC Cards Compared

SD and high-capacity SD cards (SDHC) are important components in our digital lives. Most digital cameras, GPS devices, car infotainment solutions, and other consumer gadgets rely on this memory card format, in part because capacities have increased as prices have plummeted. However, enthusiasts don’t want just any memory card. They want the best one.

Secure Digital (SD) is based on the MultiMediaCard (MMC) format. The main difference between the two is a white protection switch that comes with all modern SD and SDHC cards, which is part of what makes SD cards thicker than MMC cards. Although most SD cards use MBR partitions and are preformatted with FAT32, it is possible to use all kinds of formats supported by your host devices. Also, pay attention to the SD version. SD 1.0 and 1.1 support up to 2GB. Any card 4GB and over is based on SDHC. Card readers supporting SDHC/SD 2.0 are downward compatible, but you can't use an SDHC card in an older SD 1.0/1.1 device.

The miniSD and microSD formats exist for small, portable devices, such as smart phones. But reduced dimensions come at the expense of decreased performance. SD memory cards are rated by speed categories determined by the SD Association. The common x-ratings, as in 60x for 60 times CD-ROM speed (60 x 150 KB/s = 9,000 KB/s) still apply, but the division into classes has also become popular. Class 2 means 2 MB/s, Class 4 stands for 4 MB/s, Class 6 for 6 MB/s, and so on.

The cards we look at in this article are Class 10, with one exception. Be aware that the class rating doesn’t tell you the maximum throughput, only the minimum sustainable transfer rate. We received 8GB and 16GB product samples from Lexar, Samsung, SanDisk, Silicon Power, and Transcend.

Lexar Professional (8GB, 133x)

We asked for a Class 10 SDHC card for this review and received a Lexar Professional 133x instead. In practice, these are equivalent, though.

Only 4GB and 8GB capacity points are available, but Lexar includes an Image Rescue software bundle. This allows users to recover images that have been deleted or made inaccessible through modification of the partition. As long as the data isn’t physically overwritten, Image Rescue should help recover all of your photo files.

This card is rated for 133x, but it's still able to reach 20 MB/s. This turns out to be almost exactly what we measured. Read throughput falls between 18.2 and 19.7 MB/s, and writes are executed at 12.4 to 18.6 MB/s. Finally, this is the only card except SanDisk’s Extreme model that delivers substantial I/O performance—in case you want to use the memory card to host an operating system.

Samsung Plus MB-SP4G (8GB SDHC, Class 6)

Samsung does sell memory cards as retail products, but you'll have to hunt for them. We found them under camera accessories on European sites, and it appears that this product is not yet available in the U.S.

The MB-SP4G is referred to as an SD Plus card, with Plus suggesting that it is more durable than other products when it comes to mechanical and magnetic influence. The specs say that you can bend the cards with up to 60 N and apply a torque of up to 900 Nm (663 lb-ft). The cards also withstand up to 50 G, and are waterproof thanks to a protective epoxy molding compound. Samsung utilizes metal instead of a plastic SD card housing to achieve this higher durability. The firm says the card is even resistant to X-ray radiation, withstanding up to 4,000 Gauss.

All of this is great, but the card is a Class 6 model that doesn’t deliver on the promise of being 25% to 40% faster than the competition. The price for Samsung's solid design is performance. The 8GB Samsung Plus MB-SP4G card is limited to a maximum of 16 MB/s throughput, Still, it consistently maintains at least 15 MB/s for reads, keeping it close to the competition. Writes are clearly slower, even though Samsung outperforms the Class 6 specification (6 MB/s).

SanDisk Extreme (16GB SDHC, Class 10)

SanDisk’s Extreme series is now available at up to 32GB and rates as Class 10-compliant (10 MB/s). The 16GB sample we received delivers reads between 25 and 27 MB/s and writes at 22.6 to 24.7 MB/s. Please note that most USB 2.0 card readers aren't capable of matching the performance potential of the SanDisk Extreme card. We had to get an ImageMate by SanDisk to reach more than 20 MB/s.

The card lists on SanDisk’s Web site at $195.99, but you can also get the 32GB model for $388.99 or the 8GB for $119.99. SanDisk provides a lifetime warranty on its Extreme cards, and the company offers a compatibility tool on its site to help customers select the right memory card for their devices.

As usual, SanDisk's product is fast and expensive. This and the Lexar are the only two SDHC cards that deliver hard drive-like I/O performance. This is clearly the fastest product in our roundup, and hence receives our Best of Tom’s Award.

Silicon Power SDHC Class 10 (16GB)

Our next card is Silicon Power’s 16GB Class 10 SDHC. Like Samsung's card, the Silicon Power product is also backed by a lifetime warranty, but the manufacturer is more specific with technical details.

There is a specified operating range of -25°C to 85°C and up to 95% humidity. You can also opt for Class 2, Class 4, or Class 6 versions of the card, but the Class 10 model definitely is the fastest. Also, 4, 8, and 16 gigabyte capacities are available.

We measured read performance between 18.3 and 19.7 MB/s and sequential writes between 10.2 and 18.7 MB/s. SanDisk and Transcend provide a bit more performance, but they cost more. Compared to other vendors, the roughly $100 price point for the 16GB model appears on-target .

Transcend Ultimate SDHC Class 10 Card (8GB, 16GB)

Transcend sent us two SDHC Class 10 cards, a 16GB and an 8GB model. The specification section on Transcend's site specs these cards at 10,000 insert/eject cycles and operational temperatures between -25°C to 85°C. The card should be available for less than $100, and Transcend provides a 30-year warranty.

We found the 8GB model's throughput slightly lower than the 16GB version, but the difference is too small to consider when purchasing. Access time is almost the same for both cards (1.2 to 1.3 ms), and the difference in throughput might only be noticeable if you need to write large amounts of data onto the cards within a short time.

The 8GB card is faster when it comes to I/O operations, but both cards don’t deliver sufficient IOPS to host an operating system.

Test Setup And Access Time

Access Time

The access time test is typically not particularly important for memory cards used in digital cameras or other types of consumer devices.

SanDisk’s Extreme and the Lexar Professional are the only SDHC cards that actually deliver short write access times.

Benchmark Results: Read/Write Throughput

On most card readers, read and write performance is typically limited by the reader device. Therefore, we recommend looking for a device that specifically supports more than 20 MB/s bandwidth. SanDisk’s ImageMate proves a great solution, as it doesn't bottleneck the SD cards’ performance to less than 20 MB/s, unlike in our last SD memory card review.

The fastest card in this review (and the only product that clearly passes the 20 MB/s mark) is SanDisk’s Extreme. It sustains more than 25 MB/s on reads. Three other products are virtually identical when it comes to read performance: Transcend’s Ultimate 16GB, the Lexar Professional 8GB 133x, and Silicon Power’s Class 10 card. The smaller Transcend card has a much lower minimum throughput, making it a secondary choice for enthusiasts.

A similar picture develops when looking at write throughput results. SanDisk takes the lead while Lexar, Silicon Power, and Transcend follow in second place. Samsung cannot keep pace, but since its specification only says Class 6, we can't really object.

Our interface test reveals the maximum transfer speed of the SDHC cards in this review.

Benchmark Results: I/O Performance

These tests are negligible for consumers, but helpful for all who want to create a system using one of these cards as the system drive.

Only SanDisk and Lexar provide I/O performance sufficient to execute applications.

The Web server workload mostly requires read access, which is executed quickly on all SDHC cards. In the end, SanDisk doesn’t dominate here.

The workstation test shows similar results as in the file server run. SanDisk wins, Lexar follows, and the others are hardly useable.

Conclusion

There has been less progress on the SDHC front than in the CompactFlash form factor, which now hovers around 100 MB/s throughput. SD 2.0 cards (SDHC) are still well below 30 MB/s, and only one card in this roundup manages to jump over the 20 MB/s line. Although most cards are rated Class 10, SanDisk’s Extreme card is by far the fastest product, both for reads and writes. It also claims the crown on I/O performance.

Lexar, Silicon Power, and Transcend all share second place when it comes to throughput. They all reach nearly 20 MB/s for reads and a bit more than 18 MB/s for writes. However, compared to SanDisk, they deliver less than half the minimum write throughput, which might be important for certain applications.

It’s hardly possible to grant a Recommended Buy Award to any of the three manufacturers. They're just too close to each other. However, SanDisk clearly deserves the Best of Tom's award due to its exceptional performance.

Highest Performance Compact Flash

Professional equipment like digital SLR cameras require professional storage products. While CompactFlash capacities will soon reach 128GB, the fastest models tend not to be the largest. When we requested some of the fastest CF cards for review, what we received were mostly 16GB models (admittedly still fairly roomy). We benchmarked them to find out how these downsized speetsters stack up.

The speed ratings for memory cards are derived from the speed basis used with audio CDs: 150 KB/s. This is referred to as single or 1X speed, and memory cards, along with other storage products, use a multiple to characterize performance. The latest generation of high-performance CompactFlash cards reach 600x performance, representing 90 MB/s. A few products claim 667x (100 MB/s), but these aren’t widely available yet.

CompactFlash comes in two physical formats, Type I and Type II. Type II allows cards to have a thickness of up to 5 mm, while Type I is limited to 3.3 mm. Practically all CF memory cards are Type I. While type alone doesn’t have an impact on performance, future revisions of the CF standard (beyond version 4.1) are expected to be based on a serial interface, whereas all existing CF products come with an integrated UltraDMA interface. UltraDMA/133 was introduced with CF standard 4.0 and paved the way for today’s performance. The move to serial should allow for even greater results.

Lexar Professional 600x (16GB)

Lexar is part of the Micron group, selling all sorts of memory products, from memory cards to PC memory. We received a 16GB Professional 600x CF card for testing. A 32GB model is announced, but more diffciult to find. There's also an 8GB model. All of these come with a lifetime warranty.

The 600x model specifies sustained read and write throughput of 90 MB/s, which we could not reach in our testing. Our peak transfer speed was roughly 85 MB/s, and average performance was very near this level. Average performance is your key metric when you absolutely have to meet certain read performance requirements.

Write performance topped out at 82 MB/s with similar average throughput results. Minimum write performance came in at 59.2 MB/s. This is almost as good as SanDisk's card, but Lexar maintains the highest average results.

We also measured I/O performance. The Lexar card is clearly faster than hard drives in the file server and workstation tests, and it also delivers very impressive performance in the Web server test run. Clearly, most of these cards are designed to excel at reading small chunks of data.

Lexar offers an interesting add-on for its Professional 600x customers. You can download a free copy of Image Rescue 4 software for restoring accidentally deleted images. We found that the program works really well, as long as you don’t physically overwrite data.

Click “Start Scan” to search a CF card for deleted files that may still be functional.

The software actually found lots of photos that we took several years ago!

We were able to restore all of the pictures the Image Rescue 4 software found.

Samsung Plus MP-CP4G 233x (8GB)

The Samsung Plus card (MP-CP4G) is not available in all markets. We found it in European stores after receiving the test sample from Samsung, but it isn't selling in North America, it seems. This is a 233x model rather than the 600x devices we were targeting, but we still decided to include it because of its robust design and shell.

The Plus card doesn’t aim to be stylish or fancy, only functional. The metal exterior is made of Nirosta, a trademarked type of stainless steel. Samsung doesn’t detail its rugged design beyond this point, but it underlines that the Plus card won’t have issues if you sit on it or otherwise apply pressure that could bend the housing of less sturdy CF cards. Samsung also guarantees durability against X-rays at up to 4000 Gauss.

However, there are a few drawbacks to the Plus. Capacity is limited to 8GB, which isn’t a lot once you start shooting lots of raw images in a row, as in sports photography. In addition, the product’s performance isn’t as high as other cards reviewed here. We measured a peak throughput of only 47.8 MB/s, roughly half as much as the other competitors. Effective sequential throughput is between 19.2 and 35 MB/s for writes and 19.0 to 47.8 MB/s for reads.

While other cards deliver better throughput, Samsung’s Plus delivers more I/O operations per second than the other cards, qualifying it for embedded systems. This improvement stems from the SLC NAND memory employed.

SanDisk Extreme Pro 600x (64GB)

The Extreme Pro series by SanDisk is rated at 600x speeds, and it is available in capacities of 16, 32, and 64GB. We received the 64GB flagship for review.

This unit crushes the price scales at almost $900, and even the 16GB model is priced at $335.99. This is steep, even for a premium product. In exchange, you get either a lifetime or 30-year warranty (lifetime warranties aren’t recognized in some areas).

UltraDMA 6 is used by all of the cards in this review, but SanDisk lags in our read test, where it maxes out at only 56 MB/s. At the same time, we measured up to 71.6 MB/s for sequential writes. This is disappointing considering the high price tag, but the write performance is indeed at the top of its class: a 59.8 MB/s minimum. This is what professional photographers will want. Other cards delivered more peak performance but less consistent minimums.

We didn’t have the 16GB or 32GB cards to compare against, but we’re sure that these deliver higher peak performance that what we’ve seen in previous product generations.

Silicon Power 600x (16GB)

Silicon Power offers 600x CompactFlash Type I cards at capacities of 8, 16, and 32GB. We received the 16GB model, which mopped up the competition in our benchmark runs.

Silicon Power's 91.6 MB/s interface performance is an all-time high result. The card doesn’t deliver maximum performance on sequential writes though, scoring between 50 and 82.4 MB/s. However, the read performance was really stunning. This was the only product to pass the 90 MB/s mark. A 91 MB/s minimum and 91.6 MB/s maximum speak loud and clear. Read performance was very fast and consistent, allowing copying of data from the card to a computer at the highest possible speed.

The 600x card also provided the highest Web server I/O performance in this review. File server and workstation I/O test results were more average. Interestingly, the operating temperature specs are a bit different here than on other memory cards. Silicon Power specs 0°C to 70°C, while other products may run in between -25°C and 85 °C. Like most other brands, Silicon Power provides a lifetime warranty.

Transcend Extreme Plus 600x (8GB, 16GB)

Transcend sent us two cards from its Extreme Plus 600x series: one 8GB and one 16GB.

We found that the 16GB version delivered better throughput (roughly 11 MB/s maximum difference) and was the second best in our sequential read test. The performance difference between the two cards was smaller on sequential writes.

Both deliver average I/O performance results, as they were clearly optimized for maximum throughput rather than I/O capabilities.

Transcend provides a lifetime or 30-year warranty. All other product information from Transcend is rather general.

Test Setup And Access Time

Access Time

The access time test is typically irrelevant for memory cards used in digital cameras and other types of professional devices.

Benchmark Results: Throughput

The fastest CF card comes from Silicon Image, delivering more than 90 MB/s—a new record. Most of the other cards follow closely behind, including Transcend and Lexar. Samsung was clearly slower, and SanDisk struggled in reads.

Lexar and SanDisk dominate by maintaining the highest minimum write transfer rates. These numbers are key if you want to sustain continuous raw photo shooting for more than a few seconds. Lexar, Silicon Power, and Transcend provide better maximum and average results, but the minumum write transfer rates sometimes suffer, especially for Silicon Power.

Benchmark Results: I/O Performance

I/O performance clearly is a small focus for the memory card manufacturers, as flash SSDs are in the process of replacing CF cards for embedded systems. Still, if you want to use any of these cards to install an operating system, you should go with Samsung despite the lower throughput.

Conclusion

Samsung’s Plus card runs behind competition—no surprise given its emphasis on ruggedness rather than speed. However, because Samsung's offering seems to be the only card based on SLC flash memory, this is the only card able to deliver acceptable I/O performance. Most likely, this is relevant for those of you looking for a CompactFlash system drive for embedded systems, and even then, only for potential customers in Europe (we couldn't find this submission for sale in North America).

Everyone else will probably be more interested in throughput. Silicon Power leaves a mixed impression. The company's 600x 16GB card holds the speed record at 91 MB/s for sequential reads. Silicon Power fares well on writes, too, averaging 78 MB/s. However, the minimum write throughput result, important for photographers, drops far more than cards from Lexar, Transcend, or SanDisk.

SanDisk focuses on maximum sustainable write throughput. The card's 59.8 MB/s minimum write result tops our charts, and is most suitable for professional photography, where results matter more than the time it takes to copy data off the memory card. Transcend and Lexar provide more balanced results, with Lexar attracting customers through its bonus file restoration software.

In the end, price will have a significant impact on your buying decision, but we’d go with Lexar and SanDisk for professional photography and Silicon Power or Transcend for all other applications.

Yesterday, Lexar Media announced during CES that it's shipping the highest-performing solid-state drive for end consumers--the Crucial RealSSD C300 drive--this month, with the drives expected to arrive at resellers in February. The new SSD supports the new high-speed SATA 6Gb/s interface that pukes tasty read speeds of up to 355 MB/s.

"The Crucial RealSSD C300 drive is the fastest drive we've tested to date," said Robert Wheadon, Lexar Media senior worldwide SSD product manager. "The big 'wow' factor for consumers is a marked improvement in boot-up times — the Crucial RealSSD C300 drive is blazing fast, like no other SSD we've ever seen in the Crucial Performance Lab."

The company said that the 2.5-inch form factor SSDs will arrive in two capacities: 128 GB and 256 GB. Although that's clearly not enough to store all those downloaded videos and music files, the native SATA 6Gb/s support makes the storage reduction worthwhile. Don't have the hardware for the 355 MB/s connection? The Crucial RealSSD is backwards compatible, ready for granny's 3Gb/s interface.

Look for the Crucial SSD to arrive next month at select resellers worldwide. The drives can also be purchase here online at the Crucial store. Expect to pay big bucks though: the current 256 GB SATA II SSD costs $799.99, and its smaller 128 GB cousin costs $449.99.

More on CES 2010.

Lexar Media today launched two "Echo" flashed-based backup drives that may be hard to grasp in a visual sense. The Echo ZE drive is slated to be one of the smallest USB drives in the world, measuring just 20.1 x 15.1 millimeters. It's also probably obvious that this model doesn't provide a massive load of storage space... that's coughed up by its larger cousin, the Echo SE series.

Outside the ZE's particular size, the biggest feature both drives offer is their ability to keep the PC backed up at all times thanks to software provided on the drives. The larger SE version isn't really suitable to stay plugged into a laptop (or a desktop for that matter), however the miniature Smurf-like ZE drive is designed to be "plug-and-stay," meaning it won't stick out like a mutated appendage.

Lexar Media claims that the larger SE drive offers read speeds up to 28 MB/s and write speeds up to 10 MB/s. The company didn't really provide read and write numbers in regards to the ZE drive, but did mention that both will securely encrypt user files. Both are also compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, and Mac OS X operating systems.

Although no price points were offered, the SE comes in three capacities: 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB. As for the tiny ZE drive, it comes in 8 GB, 16 GB, and 32 GB capacities. Lexar Media said that the drives will begin to hit the market next month.

More and more SSDs are hitting the market, hopefully spurring competition and eventually leading to lower prices. The latest entry comes from Lexar, today announcing its fastest Crucial solid-state drive (SSD) products to date.

These line-topping new Crucial SSDs is led by the 256 GB MLC NAND Crucial M225 SSD which gives a 250 MB/sec. read speed and a 200 MB/sec. write speed.

“By upgrading their system with a solid-state drive, mobile computer users will enjoy a faster, more rugged system with storage built for mobility. The fact that SSDs don’t have any moving parts makes Crucial solid-state drives quieter, cooler, and more durable than traditional hard drives,” said Robert Wheadon, Lexar Media’s senior worldwide product marketing manager.

The new SSDs come in a 2.5-inch form factor, but those who wish to run them in a desktop can use the Crucial SK01 External Drive Storage Kit (sold separately), which includes a 2.5-inch USB 2.0 external enclosure, a 3.5-inch SATA 3Gb/sec. hot-swappable drive bay, and a 5.25-inch drive bay bracket.

Capacities and prices of the new Crucial SSDs are: 64 GB (currently $169.99/£104.99/€120.99), 128 GB (currently $329.99/£201.99/€143.99), and 256 GB (currently $599.99/£367.99/€424.99).