Everybody loves a redemption story. Over a year ago I reviewed the Lexar NM620, a drive which has had the unfortunate distinction of being the least performant PCIe Gen 3 drive I ever reviewed. To Lexar’s credit – or at least their marketing firm – they expressed direct interest in my results, and even provided a second drive to see is my test results with the NM620 were caused by a defective drive. They have also remained in contact despite the poor review, and today they have sent over a new drive in the NM800 Pro 2TB. As my first sentence alludes to, the NM800 Pro is a much different drive than the NM620 and I am much happier with this model. Enough banter, it is time to benchmark!
Lexar NM800 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD
The Lexar NM800 Pro 2TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor and is available both with and without a heatsink.
Right out of the gate, the NM800 Pro is already scoring points in my book. My review model has the heatsink included, and yet unlike almost every other drive I have looked at that comes with a preinstalled heatsink, the one Lexar includes is easily removable. Instead of thermal epoxy or other hardened compounds found on other drives, the NM800 Pro has simple thermal pads. Instead of metal tabs that are damaged when removed, the NM800 Pro has four simple screws. It is a small thing, but considering the prevalence of motherboards with integrated heatsinks, the ability to safely and simply remove a M.2 SSD from its OEM heatsink is great.
The NM800 Pro uses an InnoGrit IG5236 controller, similar to HP FX900 Pro and the XPG GAMMIX S70. Paired with that, we have TLC NAND and a DRAM cache. The NAND is unmarked on this drive, and my utilities for identifying NAND types do not work against InnoGrit controllers, so for now, I will consider the NAND a mystery.
The back of the SSD has nothing on it, not even labels. The heatsink has a product label.
Lexar NM800 Pro SSD Specs
The NM800 Pro line of SSDs is available in sizes between 512 GB and 2 TB.
Lexar supplied the 2TB drive, and with the top SKU comes top-spec performance claims. A spec sheet showing 7500 MB/s sequential read and 6500 MB/s sequential write will provide big shoes to fill and marks the NM800 Pro as a competitor to the best drives that Sabrent, Samsung, Seagate, WD, and others can muster.
2000 TBW is a very healthy endurance number for a 2TB drive. I prefer a minimum of 600 TBW for a 1TB drive and 1600 TBW for a 2TB model, so the NM800 Pro exceeds that spec by a good bit. In addition, Lexar also provides the industry-standard 5-year warranty on their NM800 Pro drives.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD and confirms we are operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.4. Also of note, The NM800 Pro is a 2048GB drive and not a 2000GB drive.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Lexar NM800 Pro 1TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data, and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
A
Great SSD. I want it in my developers PC.
Thank You for cool review!