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.

This is the first review on our new Ryzen based SSD bench setup. The NM700 is Lexar’s flagship M.2 NVMe SSD. We reviewed the NM610 a while ago, which has turned out to be a pretty interesting price/performance option, as its price has come down significantly. While the NM610 uses a Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller, the NM700 is built around a Marvell 88SS1092 “Eldora Plus” controller—it’s been a while since we’ve reviewed a Marvell-powered SSD. The flash chips have been rebranded by Longsys, so we don’t know any details about them, other that they are TLC.

The Lexar NM700 is available in capacities of 256 GB ($50), 512 GB ($80) and 1 TB ($170). Endurance for these models is set at 150 TBW, 300 TBW and 600 TBW respectively. Lexar includes a five-year warranty.