Lexar NM610 NVMe M.2. SSD review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The new NM610 models from Lexar are a small SKU upgrade from the previous version, slightly higher volume sizes but more overly better prices. At 15 cents per GB Lexar however, remains to be slightly on the expensive side with the competitions in this saturated market being massive. What I remain to find unique about these SM2263XT products is that it is a DRAMless cache design SSD, that normally is not something many would accept. However, on Windows 10 this SSD series uses a PCIe-to NAND controller, and that controller Host Memory Buffer technology kicks in, a small chunk of your system memory substitutes the memory of the drive to cache the map table. The SSD stripped from a DRAM cache equals a nice price reduction. The performance overall, however, did not disappoint, albeit there are SSDs out there at the same price range offering 3 GB/sec read perf ranges. Reads wise this unit cannot keep up with enthusiast-class NVMe SSDs, writes are fairly normal and easily triple of that compared to a regular SATA3 SSD. So I am inclined to be positive here. The results mean that this nicely fast performing M.2. unit costs ~15 cents per GB in etail right now. The unit reveals speeds at 2GB/s reads sometimes even closing in at 3 GB/s in specific workloads with close to 1.5 GB/s in writes. The development rate and curve of current NVMe and regular NAND flash-based storage technologies are put exciting.

Performance

Technologies like TLC and QLC face some challenges writing more bits per cell of NAND, we haven't really noticed a dropoff in performance with mixed heavy workloads that exceed writing multiple gigabytes continuously. Flash NAND prices have been coming down, reliability has been top-notch and ever so importantly volume sizes have moved upwards to a level where now 1TB SSDs are getting a norm slowly. The current new mainstream is roughly 500GB / 1 TB which offers a nice balance between performance and value. At just over 1 or even 1.75 GB/s writes per seconds it is easily three times faster compared to that mainstream SATA3 SSD, while topping 3 GB/s reads and thus over quadrupling that number compared to a SATA3 SSD. Combined with a 3-year warranty you should be good to go for a long time. The TBW written values are reasonable as well, 240 TB written for this 480 GB model. 

  

Concluding

If you're on Windows 10 and are all patched up then for me there's little reason to not recommend the Lexar NM610 series SSD. Granted you're not beasting at 3 Gb/sec, but rather 2 GB/sec with 1.5 GB/s writes. That is plenty fast by any standard, we have not seen a TLC write hole either, so the HMB technology really does an exemplary job. The one thing we noticed was a massive drop in performance once the controller starts to overheat, it took nearly 200 GB of continuous writes for that to happen though. Realistically if you place this M2 SSD under your motherboard M2 heatsink, that is a non-issue. All naked, however, it could be. You do trade in a small chunk of your system memory, ergo that is the dilemma. For most of us, not an issue of course. I can tell you that the controller is impressive, maybe even faster than an embedded DRAM chip on an SSD PCB which often is DDR3 based, and our DDR4 memory these days is just so fast. As you may have noticed from the 250/500/1000GB file sizes, you miss out a few GB, that means there's SLC provisioning going on as well in order to keep the VIVO write perf up to snuff. Write performance is nice, we have written 110Gb continuously and we did not hit a TLC write hole. So the SSD can take complex workloads, under the condition you do cool it with a heatsink. We spotted this 1TB M2 NVMe SSD for $159.99 (USD), which is slightly on the high side and will make the product to be a somewhat difficult buy to all the Amazon selling brands out there. Lexar tops off this purchase with a three-year warranty. Albeit a little in that 'new mainstream', as an SSD, definitely approved. 

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