Lexar 2TB NM790 SSD PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 2280 Internal Solid State Drive, Up to 7400/6500 MB/s Read/Write, Compatible with PS5, for Gamers and Creators, Black (LNM790X002T-RNNNU)

The Lexar NM790 is relatively unknown and yet for everyday workloads it's possibly the fastest NVMe PCIe 4.0 drive currently available. It's also cheaper than competitors at this performance level, which would be drives like the WD Black SN850X and Samsung 990 Pro.I have 4TB models of all these drives. The SN850X was the king of game loading times and general gaming performance. But not any more, this Lexar just about beats it. Although all these drives are so fast that even in the absolute best case scenario you're likely looking at the NM790 loading just 1 - 2 seconds faster.I've attached an image from TechPowerUp (they have a great review) showing the NM790's overall performance. It's tied with the 990 Pro for the fastest Gen 4 drive they've tested, only beaten by a Gen 5 drive which is just 1% faster. The 990 Pro is faster with synthetic benchmarks, but for actual everyday workloads the NM790 is at least equal. The Crystal DiskMark benchmark is my own, but being as this is a synthetic benchmark it isn't all that useful apart from showing that the NM790 hits the advertised sequential read/write speeds.So why buy a SN850X/990 Pro when this Lexar is cheaper?Well some exceptions would be extremely heavy workloads that hammer the drive for many hours non-stop with reads/writes (and no this definitely doesn't include gaming). The reason is that the NM790 has no DRAM cache so eventually it will slow down under these conditions, but for the vast majority of people they will never get close to this happening. In general the NM790 deals very well with the fact that it lacks any DRAM cache, far better than most cache-less drives, so i've never run into this problem even when copying many hundreds of gigabytes.The reason it can still compete with more expensive DRAM cache based drives is because the NM790 uses a new Maxiotech controller, plus newer faster NAND flash memory that typically goes into Gen 5 drives.Like all of the fastest Gen 4 drives it gets hot, but certainly not as hot as the overpriced and almost pointless Gen 5. But you may have to point a fan at it if your case isn't well ventilated (like if you use water cooling). When the NM790 hits 70C+ it will begin to throttle speeds. This stops it from getting much hotter, and because of this some tech reviewers have mistakenly assumed that this drive has good thermal performance, but it's simply because it's throttling speeds. It actually gets hot quite easily and needs good cooling to stay under 70C. The drive works well with my Sabrent Rocket NVMe Heatsink (SB-GHSK), which only reaches 52c during stress testing and ~36c idle.It's also one of the most power efficient drives currently available. Vastly better than the SN850X and a good amount better than the 990 Pro, so it's excellent for laptops... At least if you don't care about heat.Another benefit of the NM790 is that it's single sided, in all sizes including 4TB. Meaning it's physically thinner because the NAND flash memory chips are only on one side of the PCB. This makes installation more compatible with heatsinks/laptops/consoles.And i wasn't going to mention endurance/lifespan because this is a non-issue for 99.99% of people. I was an early adopter of SSD's, i had the very first ones on the market, and i've never had an SSD/NVMe fail from endurance problems even though my PC's are powered on 24/7. If any type of SSD fails it will almost certainly be because of a fault or something else, not because the memory has worn out from too many writes. But if you still actually care... The 4TB NM790 is rated for 3000 TBW (TerraBytes Written) which means that it can write that much data to the drive before it may fail. This is a good rating and once again it's better than the competition mentioned here. The 2TB is rated for 1500 TBW and the 1TB is 1000 TBW. Again these are pretty good numbers. For comparison, both the SN850X and 990 Pro are 600 TBW (1TB), 1200 TBW (2TB), and 2400 TBW for the 4TB models.To sum everything up: If i could buy my all my NVMe drives over again, i wouldn't bother with the SN850X or 990 Pro. I'd just get several NM790's instead.

I own a production company and we film TBs of footage across the year. We wanted something that was fast but also reliable to replace the spinning disc drives we've been using for years. We also wanted something that was fairly priced, feeling the T7s were too expensive. After doing hours of research, I landed on these. The speeds are crazy - 20 minutes to copy over 500GB of 5K footage, and works like butter when editing raw clips in FCPX. We've bought 4 of these since our initial purchase and so far have not been disappointed. Great price for an impressive bit of storage. Hoping they continue to deliver long into the future!

Installed into an Asus ROG Ally, easy swap and does what it says, faster than the original. Very happy with the purchase.

Amazingly fast and easy to install in a PS5. 4TB SSD really pleased with the results. Highly recommend.

Great drive (using for OS and games), reviews seem to rate it highly. Doesn't suffer too much that I've noticed from lack of DRAM cache, while drives with one are priced a lot higher

Bought this to replace my 4tb HD which gave up the ghost and died on me so bought the M2 4TB space saver, will buy an SSD 4 tb later on , speedy delivery next day great buy.

All worked fine!

Excellent all round for gaming on PC.