Lexar NM610 M.2 2280 NVMe 500GB SSD Review

SSD’s have been around for quite a few years now in the consumer space. It’s only really been in the last year or two that M.2 based drives like Lexar’s NM610 have started to gain serious traction. Outside of deep-pocketed enthusiasts pushing the bleeding edge, most people still rocked SATA based drives. While this worked, it was really just an extension of (parallel)ATA from 1986 that went serial in 2003. Inefficient protocols and limited bandwidth really kept SSD’s from realizing their potential on SATA ports. M.2 is a physical form-factor that encompasses several different interfaces, but it has mostly settled as ubiquitous with PCIe x4 based drives for most consumers. Add in modern storage protocols like Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe and you get a serious performance boost. The fact that it can be used directly on the motherboard with zero cables has pretty much cemented M.2 drives as the go-to for most users. PC Test Bench would like to thank Lexar for providing us with a sample of the NM610 to check out. Lexar’s take on the NM610 Drive: Elevate your PC’s performance with faster speed and more efficiency - Designed to elevate your PC experience with faster load times and transfer speeds from boot-up to shut down, the Lexar NM610 M.2 2280 PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe Solid-State Drive (SSD) will put you in the computing fast lane with speeds up 2100MB/s read and 1600MB/s write. It’s supported by the PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe 1.3 technology standard and built with the latest 3D NAND flash. PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe - Move beyond the pace of a SATA SSD’s with an upgrade to the Lexar NM610 and get 3.5x the speed of SATA-based SSD3. With PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe 1.3 standard and speeds up to 2100MB/s read and 1600MB/s write, you will feel the improved performance from boot-ups, software load times, and transfers giving you maximum efficiency without the constant slowdowns. The NM610 is built with 3D NAND flash inside. Ideal for PC enthusiast - With sequential read speeds of up to 2100MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 1600MB/s, you’ll enjoy better all-around performance for your PC. That’s faster boot-ups, data transfers, and application load times compared to a SATA SSD. Built to last - Unlike traditional hard disk drives, the NM610 has no moving parts, so it’s less likely to fail. On top of that, it’s also shock and vibration resistant, making it one robust and reliable SSD. Efficient - Reduced power consumption and cooler operation make the battery life last longer than an HDD. Rigorously tested - All Lexar product designs undergo extensive testing in the Lexar Quality Labs, facilities with more than 1,100 digital devices, to ensure performance, quality, compatibility, and reliability. About Lexar: Lexar was split off from Cirrus Logic in 1996 in San Jose, California, and manufactured flash storage products including SD and CF memory cards, USB flash drives, and Solid-State Drives. Lexar was later acquired by Micron in 2006 and continued on until 2017 until parent company Micron announced it would discontinue its retail removable media storage business and put it up for sale. Lexar branding and trademark rights were purchased by China-based memory company Longsys. FEATURES High-speed PCIe Gen3x4 interface: 2100MB/s read and 1600MB/s write1 –NVMe 1.3 supported 2 2280 form factor Get 3.5x the speed of a SATA-based SSD3 Ideal for PC enthusiasts 3D NAND Features LDPC (Low-Density Parity Check) Shock and vibration resistant with no moving parts2 Three-year limited warranty SPECIFICATIONS Capacity - 250GB, 500GB, 1TB Form Factor - M.2 2280 Interface - PCIe Gen3x4 Speed 250GB sequential read up to 2000MB/s read sequential write up to 1200MB/s IOPS: up to 110/151K 500GB sequential read up to 2100MB/s read sequential write up to1600MB/s IOPS: up to 188/156K 1TB sequential read up to 2100MB/s read sequential write up to1600MB/s IOPS: up to 188/156K NAND flash - 3D TLC Operating Temperature - 0° C to 70° C (32°F to 158°F) Storage Temperature - -40° C to 85° C (-40°F to 185°F) Shock Resistant - 1500G, duration 0.5ms, Half Sine Wave Vibration Resistant - 10~2000Hz, 1.5mm, 20G, 1 Oct/min, 30min/axis(X,Y,Z) TBW 250GB: 125TB 500GB: 250TB 1TB: 500TB DWPD 250GB: 0.46 500GB: 0.46 1TB: 0.46 MTBF - 1,500,000 Hours Dimension (L x W x H) - 80 mm x 22 mm x 2.25 mm / 3.15” x 0.87” x 0.09” Weight - 9g A Closer Look Lexar’s NM610 drive comes in a small black box with a full-color picture of the drive. The capacity is indicated clearly on the silver top. The rear of the box indicates the top speed in the corner and has a short blurb about the drive in a few languages. The NM610 itself is your typical M-Key M.2 2280 drive. A label covers most of the front of the drive but the black PCB should blend in with most builds if not covered. The NM610 is a single-sided drive, so compatibility with almost any system is almost guaranteed. The NM610 is powered by Silicon Motions SM2263XT controller. This DRAM-less controller utilizes a Host Memory Buffer for cost reasons to regain some performance lost from not having onboard ram. It also uses SMI’s proprietary NANDXtend ECC which ensures data integrity over time, leading to the 250TB of writes available on this 500GB drive. Four 64L TLC NAND flash chips make up the storage pool, and the 512GB physical capacity means there is 12GB of over-provisioning for wear leveling. Testing Test Platform: CPU Intel Core i9-10900k Mobo Aorus Z490 Master RAM 32GB HyperX Fury RGB GPU Nvidia RTX 2080 FE OS SSD Kingston KC1000 1TB CrystalDiskInfo We see our drive can use the maximum bandwidth available from an M.2 Slot running PCIe 3.0 x4. At idle Temps are cool with the drive hovering around 30C. During testing, we only saw the drive warm up into the low 50C range, far from throttling. Sequential Testing – Variable Queue Depth Sequential speeds start around 420MB/s for reads and around 380MB/s for writes at QD1. We see a slight dip at QD2 and then things shoot up at QD4 to about 790MB/s on writes and 640MB/s on reads and mostly stay there. Random Testing – Variable Queue Depth Random performance is decent on the write side with IOPS hovering around 8000 at QD1, but reads don’t climb much with queue depth. Simultaneous mixed-use, made up of 70% read and 30% write is also held back by reads. CrystalDiskMark 7.0 “CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows measuring sequential and random read/write speeds." One nice thing to see here is that low queue-depth reads on the NM610 are not far behind higher queue-depth reads. Random performance is fairly strong as well. On the write side, things look even better with the NM610 able to stay above 1600MB/s in sequential with random QD1 4K performance hugging the 200MB/s mark. You’ll notice solid performance in typical day to day low queue depth usage scenarios. PCMark 10 Storage Test PCMark 10 introduces a set of four storage benchmarks that use relevant real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the latest modern drives. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The Data Drive Benchmark is designed to test drives that are used for storing files rather than applications. You can also use this test with NAS drives, USB sticks, memory cards, and other external storage devices. With a varying workload that mimics real-world activities a user might do on a computer, the NM610 holds to the 300MB/s mark, indicating decent performance in the real world. ATTO Disk Benchmark ATTO gives us readings close to specified on writes, and around 200MB/s under specified read speeds. Still decent numbers though. Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil’s overall score of 11,127 points is pretty decent for this class of drive. Black Magic Disk Speed Test Disk Speed Test is an easy to use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high-quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. Disk Speed Test will continue to test writes and reads from your disk so you can evaluate both performance and readability over time. One of the biggest needs for fast storage is video editing, and Lexar’s NM610 is well up to the task with it providing plenty of performance for dealing with most common video formats. Final Thoughts & Conclusion While Lexar’s NM610’s overall speed won’t break any records, it provides a very solid level of performance for real-world daily use. Many users make the mistake of chasing the costly high queue-depth sequential benchmark performance numbers, but that doesn’t represent real-world usage. Lexar’s NM610 provides performance in line with much more expensive drives at the far more realistic Queue Depth of 1. With a street price of around $85 for the 500GB model, it’s pricing falls in line with the capacity and performance level. If you happen to catch it on sale, it’s a no-brainer, but there just isn’t enough to stand out from the crowd on its own in a heavily saturated market. Good Job Lexar.