Lexar NM790 M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4×4 NVMe SSD

Fast Enough – I had a SK HYNIX platinum P41 starting to give me slow read speeds so I sent it back to the supplier for testing and they confirmed after 12 months that the drive was faulty. Not wanting to go down that path again I started looking for a NVME drive to match my Samsung 990 pro and I found one for sixty dollars less. The drive happened to be a… Read more

Lexar NM790 , now I have used Lexar products in the past but not their NVME drives . Apart from the price and the 5 year warranty the specs matched that of the Samsung 990 pro but I wondered about the price. Turns out there is a reason for this, as unlike the 990 pro ,this drive carries no DRAM but uses your PC's HMB , in theory this should make the Lexar less reliable , but then again it is an emerging trend amongst NVME manufacturers in order to drive the price down.

I was eager to test the drive and as you can see from the supplied figures it matches the read speed of the Samsung but falls behind on the write speed. I ran these tests a number of times and noted that when the drive was empty I was getting faster figures but since I cloned my system to this new drive it meant both drives were on equal footing.

A 5 year warranty puts the icing on the cake and as I am not a heavy media creator I doubt I will see any significant differences in day to day use. Both these drives are PCIE express 4 and not the newer PCIE5 which at the time of writing were delivering over 10,000 MB/s at a hefty price tag. I doubt gamers or just the average joe will ever need anything faster than these , so at the price it is a no brainer to try the Lexar.