Introduction

Lexar has made a name for itself in the portable storage market—they are very well known for their SD cards and USB sticks, so it’s natural for them to expand into other areas of flash storage, like consumer SSDs. Lexar was founded as a subsidiary of Micron, but was sold to Longsys in 2017 and has been operating quite independently since.

Lexar announced the NM620 SSD last month, on March 11th. It is based on the combination of a Lexar DM620 flash controller and Micron 3D TLC flash. A DRAM chip is not available, due to the drive being designed for entry-level, light workloads. Lexar building their own flash controller “DM620” made big waves in the industry. Everybody wondered whether it is based on some existing IP, or if Lexar’s parent company Longsys could become a major player in the SSD flash controller market soon. As always—competition is good, because it drives innovation and brings down pricing for us customers. For the case of the Lexar NM620, it looks like the controller is a rebranded Innogrit IG5216 “Shasta+” controller, possibly with custom firmware. The Lexar DM620 controller has support for NVMe 1.4, over four channels.

The Lexar NM620 is available in capacities of 256 GB ($45), 512 GB ($90) and 1 TB ($160). Endurance for these models is set at 125 TBW, 250 TBW and 500 TBW respectively. Lexar includes a five-year warranty with the NM620.