Today, we are looking at the Lexar PLAY 2280 4TB NVMe SSD. Just over a year ago I took a look at a 2230 sized drive in Lexar’s PLAY line, and today we have a more standard 2280 sized entry. Despite sharing the PLAY branding, this drive and that are very different, in more ways than just size, as you will see in my review.
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Lexar PLAY 2280 4TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD
Beneath the included heatsink, the Lexar PLAY 2280 4TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
It has been a while since I have had the opportunity to complain about a drive with a difficult or impossible to remove factory heatsink; thankfully, the streak continues! The included heatsink on the PLAY 2280 has four teeny tiny screws holding it on, but after removing those it pops right off. The NAND appears to be YMTC 232-layer TLC, and the controller is a Maxio MAP1602. That combination of components makes the PLAY essentially identical to the Lexar NM790 I previously reviewed, which makes sense because they have very similar performance claims. Regardless, there is no DRAM cache.
The backside of the Lexar PLAY 2280 4TB has nothing of note, so the bottom of the heatsink is more interesting.
Lexar PLAY 2280 4TB SSD Specs
The Lexar PLAY 2280 drives are available between 2GB and 8TB capacity points.
All the drives in the PLAY 2280 series come rated for 7400 MB/s read and 6500 MB/s write, and those are big claims for a DRAM-less drive, pitting the PLAY 2280 against the best that Gen 4 has to offer.
Endurance is rated at 3200 TBW for the 4TB drive, which is great. My standard for endurance on a 4TB drive would normally be 2400 TBW, and the PLAY 2280 easily exceeds that. The warranty is the industry standard 5-years for a premium drive.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD and confirms we are operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 2.0.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR5-6000 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Lexar PLAY 2280 4TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. This slot supports up to PCIe Gen 5 x4. 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.
Really wish you’d add power usage to M.2 SSDs.