Introduction

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

Just a few weeks ago we reviewed the Lexar NM790 4 TB. While 4 TB is a ton of capacity, a lot of readers have been wondering how the 2 TB model performs. That’s why we have the 2 TB model for review today. Just like the 4 TB model, the NM790 2 TB uses the Maxiotech MAP1602 controller that we’ve seen on drives like the Acer Predator GM7, Colorful CN700 and Netac NV7000-T. There’s also no change in the flash chips, the NAND flash is 232-layer TLC, made by YMTC. There’s just two instead of four chips. Just like on other MAP1602 designs, a DRAM cache chip is not included.

The Lexar NM790 is available in capacities of 512 GB ($45), 1 TB ($63), 2 TB ($110) and 4 TB ($190). Endurance for these models is set to 500 TBW, 1000 TBW, 1500 TBW and 3000 TBW, respectively. Lexar includes a five-year warranty with the NM790.