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, 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.

We’re testing the Lexar NM790 4 TB today. It seems that vendors finally realized that SSD pricing has come down so much, that 4 TB capacity drives are interesting for users. With a price point of just $210 for the reviewed 4 TB model, the NM790 is very affordable and offers great performance at the same time. This is important—nobody wants a 4 TB QLC drive that gets HDD write speeds when heavily loaded. Under the hood the NM790 uses the Maxiotech MAP1602 controller that we’ve seen on drives like the Acer Predator GM7, Colorful CN700 and Netac NV7000-T. As expected, the NAND flash is 232-layer TLC, made by YMTC. Just like on other MAP1602 designs, a DRAM cache chip is not included.

The Lexar NM790 is available in capacities of 512 GB ($50), 1 TB ($70), 2 TB ($125) and 4 TB ($210). 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 NV7000-T.