Lexar NM790 4 TB

[sn4k3PT]

It runs hot as hell without a fan for one, U.2 cabled adaptors are loose. And lastly no warranty.

How much hot did that SSD runs for you?

It's true that U.2 cable adaptors from china may not be the best, there aren't much alternatives either but I don't find it to be a problem (I use the one that solders to m2 PCB with black tape cover then direct cable to U2 [No detachable cable]). Maybe the heat from your drive is causing dilation to the port and get loose?

About warranty may be different on your country, but in Portugal it's flawless as long you buy it from a national store, you have the right to it for the stated years by law, in any event you can file an RMA and send the product to the store where you buy and they will handle it for you (They take care of all handling with the brand company without any charge, and sent back to you for free), no questions nor hard times, easy as send and get a new one. This is true for all products in country with an invoice which all stores are obligated to emit invoices, but the enterprise SSD are 5 years at least, while consumer are 3 years (Was two before new EU law). If you a drive abuser it will worth, because if drive is out of production and stock, they are obliged to give you an alternative product (of you choose) with similar or better specs (never worse) and the warranty will reset with that product, meaning if the product they use to replace have 5years warranty, you will get 5 more years of warranty from the day of replacement, not to mention some "lifetime" warranties on some products. Another key about warranty is that if you send same product model 3 times with defects you can opt for a full refund of paid price or replacement no matter the time within the warranty. It's "stupid" how consumer have dam rights here and no one can deny it, it's often common people trash their phones on purpose after a year or two to get a new one, re-sell it as new boxed and get the next model. That's a shameful behavior IMO and an abuse of the rights which should not be allowed, it is compared to ebay disputes where buyer "always" win with minor effort, and as a seller I know the frustration of getting scammed with false claims that take advantage of the system.

Back to SSD's, this Lexar comes at great price for sure, hard to beat, 211 eur (or 170 eur without vat) * 2 and RAID will give you the 8Tb cheaper than a DC1500M, but my concern is always the durability, wear and data integrity. When a "new player" comes with a "boom" product and seems too good value, I always like to wait and see where it goes.
Don't get me wrong, I really want them to thrive, only then we can have better competitive and cheaper products, as long it doesn't affect the quality.

 

[DaveLT]

How much hot did that SSD runs for you?

It's true that U.2 cable adaptors from china may not be the best, there aren't much alternatives either but I don't find it to be a problem (I use the one that solders to m2 PCB with black tape cover then direct cable to U2 [No detachable cable]). Maybe the heat from your drive is causing dilation to the port and get loose?

About warranty may be different on your country, but in Portugal it's flawless as long you buy it from a national store, you have the right to it for the stated years by law, in any event you can file an RMA and send the product to the store where you buy and they will handle it for you (They take care of all handling with the brand company without any charge, and sent back to you for free), no questions nor hard times, easy as send and get a new one. This is true for all products in country with an invoice which all stores are obligated to emit invoices, but the enterprise SSD are 5 years at least, while consumer are 3 years (Was two before new EU law). If you a drive abuser it will worth, because if drive is out of production and stock, they are obliged to give you an alternative product (of you choose) with similar or better specs (never worse) and the warranty will reset with that product, meaning if the product they use to replace have 5years warranty, you will get 5 more years of warranty from the day of replacement, not to mention some "lifetime" warranties on some products. Another key about warranty is that if you send same product model 3 times with defects you can opt for a full refund of paid price or replacement no matter the time within the warranty. It's "stupid" how consumer have dam rights here and no one can deny it, it's often common people trash their phones on purpose after a year or two to get a new one, re-sell it as new boxed and get the next model. That's a shameful behavior IMO and an abuse of the rights which should not be allowed, it is compared to ebay disputes where buyer "always" win with minor effort, and as a seller I know the frustration of getting scammed with false claims that take advantage of the system.

Back to SSD's, this Lexar comes at great price for sure, hard to beat, 211 eur (or 170 eur without vat) * 2 and RAID will give you the 8Tb cheaper than a DC1500M, but my concern is always the durability, wear and data integrity. When a "new player" comes with a "boom" product and seems too good value, I always like to wait and see where it goes.
Don't get me wrong, I really want them to thrive, only then we can have better competitive and cheaper products, as long it doesn't affect the quality.

70c and I almost burned my hand touching it
It's just loose even when the drive is cool, if I knock into my PC it might disconnect, which is a total PC reboot when it happens

Nobody sells DC drives here unless you're a enterprise. Lexar has been around for a while now. By that logic, WD can't be trusted either... which would be ironic because they sell DC SSDs as HGST.
By the way, good luck getting TWO U.2 SSDs on a mainstream platform. I need the x4 slot for my 10Gb card and I'm adapting one of two M.2 slots to do it

 

[sn4k3PT]

70c and I almost burned my hand touching it

That's a high value, even within the operation spec is not pleasing to have. Most consumer SSD is rated up to 70ºc and in the past I saw some user reports of Samsung nvme evos hit those temperatures. I never experienced such temperatures, so far, I managed to get 55ºc while benchmarking which is an extreme to my usage. In comparison my 990 Pro idles at 43ºc on Windows (With motherboard heatsink). I do have a 10-fan (P14 and P12) case which helps a lot on temperatures.

It's just loose even when the drive is cool, if I knock into my PC it might disconnect, which is a total PC reboot when it happens

Wow that's a danger... I would glue that connector with something easy to remove, eg: T-7000 (The black epoxy) or some tape around to make sure it won't move or cause that acident.
By any chance have you tried this adaptor: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004851254015.htm ? It works solid for me.

Nobody sells DC drives here unless you're a enterprise.

Sad to hear that, here anyone can buy them, but they are not very available, you can find Kingston DC, Ultrastar DC, Intel DC, one or two toshiba models, Micron and some Samsungs. But in general price is not the best, eg: SN840 15.36TB costs 2218.42 eur (Without vat) but the 7.6TB version costs 540 eur which turn in better value that his large brother.

Lexar has been around for a while now. By that logic, WD can't be trusted either...

When I said "new player" I was referring to a brand reputation in certain product segment. Beside Lexar have been in memory segment for long, SDDs department is relatively new, this of course don't mean they are bad nor underperform, maybe they are just cutting profit edge to get market cap and reputation in the segment. As told I want them to win and impact the market.
WD was my favorite HDD brand, but for SSD I don't like them very much. The first and only SSD I got problems with was a WD (SN750) with a strange behavior, it just randomly disconnects from PC, drive stay in explorer as a ghost and only cutting power to whole PC and reboot solve the problem (If I reboot without drain the power first SSD would not be detected in BIOS). I tried firmware updates, different slots, format OS nothing solved. That last month's and happen only once in a period of day(s). Suddenly it stops doing that and now working for more than a year without doing such. I never found the issue nor the solution. Beside it cause no data loss nor any damage it took away my confidence on WD SDD. In the end is all a matter of personal experiences, luck or lack of it...

 

[c2DDragon]

Why brother with "overpriced" consumer SSD's when you can get Entreprise SSD's for a same price or less?
Consumer SSD's are a joke, only recently they start to release "good" 4TB TLC to market, eg: KC3000, but major 4TB and 8TB are crap QLC.
Entreprise SSD's are at quality TLC nands on 4TB and 8TB for years!
Eg, DC1500M 7.6TB costs here 500 eur (Thats 100 eur more than a "4Tb Kingston FURY Renegade" for the double space!) and with 1 DWPD/5years! Entreprise NAND is much more reliable because it scope of use and in that area they can't mess with specs or manipulate the product, something that is frequent in consumer products. Not to mention the extra warranty period you get, 5 years on most!
A SK Hynix (HFS7T6GDUFEH-A430A) costs about 366 Eur on ebay new, even cheaper than this Lexar (cost per Gb)

Just buy M.2 to U.2 converter (Same protocol just different connector), get Entreprise NAND and call it a day, get more and better for less!
And if you want the best just look for Samsung PM9A3 (If you can get a good deal)

For 524€ here I could have half the performance and more hassle (U.2) ?
I don't find this attractive at all.

If you want a lot of space for backup or storing files/movies/pictures and so on, at "cheap" price, you can get a 18To HDD for even less than 500€ (293,65€ in France). Ok it's not a SSD you will tell me. You compared an "overpriced" gen4 m.2 with a gen3 u.2

I just ordered a Lexar NM790 4TB for 219,99€ (just one for now).
NO RAGRETS !

 

[sn4k3PT]

For 524€ here I could have half the performance and more hassle (U.2) ?
I don't find this attractive at all.

Maybe now with this Lexar, before that (looking at quality ones) you had 4TB KC3000 for about 350€, that mean you could have 7.6TB for 174€ more which for me is worthy deal, because 8TB of KC3000 would end in 700€, 2 slots and RAID if you want it as "one".
Now with this Lexar is possible to get two cheaper than DC, but price is not always the factor.

"Half the performance"
In disks there are things more important than performance (which from vendor specs is just marketing), for example, would you trade 10 times more the speed of this lexar in exchange of a 100TBW rating or mediocre NAND? I guess no...
Also, most user don't really benefit of the hype speeds of M2, looking at chart ("real-life benchmarks") comparing this lexar or 990 pro to an old SATA 860 EVO yields a difference of 36% in performance, even comparing a M.2 gen 4 to SATA3 is not half the performance in real-life usage, so gen3 vs gen4 at this stage is very close and not half as you may think.
Unless you do heavy work in sequential I/O you need to look at Random I/O performance which is what most users want in SSD or HDD. And by your "half-performance" indicate you only looked at least important factor and a marketing strategy (The vendor speed) which will drop anyway after sustained period ends "These speeds are sustained until 273 GB have been written" meaning even if you use this disk to heavy sequential workloads like video rendering it may not be the best product and after 273GB all that expected performance will drop significantly.
Opening lexar product page shows no random speed for me under the specs, when one of the most important spec is hidden from table or hard to find it's a red flag for me (No matter that kind of product I always found a poor and disloyal policy to hide important number from customers on main specs/table/datasheet). Opening one of their hidden text-contents they state: "random read speeds of up to 1,000,000 IOPs", which is very vague and mediocre statement
Then lower we find:
"""
1. Up to 7400MB/s read transfer, write transfer speeds lower. Speeds based on internal testing. Actual performance may vary.
2. Comparison based on internal testing. Actual performance may vary.
"""

So, the announced speeds/performance is never to be trusted because they are best-case and ideal use scenario when they are new and empty and not real-life usage (benchmarking software).
This is where sites such techpowerup come and help users with real data and tests.

If you follow the 4K tests you can find these values:
4K Random Read: 83.818 IOPs
4K Random Write: 28.586 IOPs
4K Random R/W (50%/50%): 35.244 IOPs
What a poor result comparing to what lexar tell.
If you follow sequential tests with 512K you will also see that drive do not use the maximum advertised speeds.
Then following to latency this lexar is one of the worse in the test for the Random I/O.

The bottom line, this drive performance is not as you may think nor double performance as you state, that's one factor why is cheap comparing to others, there are also other important factors to take in account. But in general, for common user is a great drive given it value. For professional use I can't say the same. Even for normal consumer with lots of random I/Os you better go other drive such as KC3000 or Kingston Fury Renegade (both costs the same 350€) which give you better random I/O (About 3x more write IOPs!) and one of the best sustained sequential drives out there.
Of course, price is always on scale and between 200€ drive and 350€ drive most user will opt for 200€ drive, the problem with that is most also think the difference is just the price.

 

[chrcoluk]

Why brother with "overpriced" consumer SSD's when you can get Entreprise SSD's for a same price or less?
Consumer SSD's are a joke, only recently they start to release "good" 4TB TLC to market, eg: KC3000, but major 4TB and 8TB are crap QLC.
Entreprise SSD's are at quality TLC nands on 4TB and 8TB for years!
Eg, DC1500M 7.6TB costs here 500 eur (Thats 100 eur more than a "4Tb Kingston FURY Renegade" for the double space!) and with 1 DWPD/5years! Entreprise NAND is much more reliable because it scope of use and in that area they can't mess with specs or manipulate the product, something that is frequent in consumer products. Not to mention the extra warranty period you get, 5 years on most!
A SK Hynix (HFS7T6GDUFEH-A430A) costs about 366 Eur on ebay new, even cheaper than this Lexar (cost per Gb)

Just buy M.2 to U.2 converter (Same protocol just different connector), get Entreprise NAND and call it a day, get more and better for less!
And if you want the best just look for Samsung PM9A3 (If you can get a good deal)

Didnt realise such convertor exists, so could pre install convertor before board goes in case, and then have easy installation of drives via U.2 cable after board is in case, M.2 is such a hassle worse thing ever on a board. Also nice observation on the 4TB enterprise pricing.

 

[sn4k3PT]

Didnt realise such convertor exists, so could pre install convertor before board goes in case, and then have easy installation of drives via U.2 cable after board is in case, M.2 is such a hassle worse thing ever on a board.

For me U.2 is easier than a SATA because you don't need extra cable from PSU but you limited to the available convertors, there are some with detachable cable but I don't like, still for who need custom length or to use quality cables that is preferred.

There's also PCI to U.2 for who don't have M.2

And if you have a x16 slot to waste and can afford to limit GPU to 8x:

Why do you find M.2 a hassle?

 

[chrcoluk]

For me U.2 is easier than a SATA because you don't need extra cable from PSU but you limited to the available convertors, there are some with detachable cable but I don't like, still for who need custom length or to use quality cables that is preferred.

There's also PCI to U.2 for who don't have M.2

And if you have a x16 slot to waste and can afford to limit GPU to 8x:

Why do you find M.2 a hassle?

Its a connector on board with a tiny screw which in an assembled case standing up is a pain in the backside to work with especially when in close proximity to other components, give me sliding in drives in and out of drive bays any day of the week over it. I have all my SATA cables installed when board is in case, so if I add new SATA devices the cables are already prerouted to back of drive bays (alongside power cables), its a doddle by comparison, and since U.2 uses cables it will have the same ease (slightly easier than SATA as you said due to no separate power cable). If the industry changes to clipping the drive in place like dimms my view may change.

 

[Haldi]

Wtf?

Wtf2?

So a 4K Random QD4 is just something that NEVER actually happens?




Currently on sale on amazon.de for 166€ which i would consider a great Deal.

 

[W1zzard]

So a 4K Random QD4 is just something that NEVER actually happens?

Correct, like 90% of consumer disk activity is QD1

 

[Haldi]

So what a out Windows doing an Update in the Background.
Steam Downloading a Game.
And me wanting to unzip my 50gb Foto collection.
? That might be the closest thing in the real world that comes to mind.

 

[THE_EGG]

Bought one of these based on the review!

Can confirm it's a speedy boi + runs surprisingly cool.

Solid 12-15C cooler than my older Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB fwiw.

 

[QUANTUMPHYSICS]

So you can now get a 13900K, Asus Z790/ 32GB DDR5 and a 4TB SSD for just $1000!!!

Add a 1000W PSU and an AIO and you're just under $1500.

THESE ARE REMARKABLE TIMES!!!

 

[DaveLT]

So what a out Windows doing an Update in the Background.
Steam Downloading a Game.
And me wanting to unzip my 50gb Foto collection.
? That might be the closest thing in the real world that comes to mind.

Its called sequential then. Most uses are QD1 4K.

 

[W1zzard]

So what a out Windows doing an Update in the Background.
Steam Downloading a Game.
And me wanting to unzip my 50gb Foto collection.
? That might be the closest thing in the real world that comes to mind.

These are all QD1, maybe the Windows update sometimes QD2 for a split second

 

[Hydro01]

And something even more insane will appear in the Chinese market. There were rumors about JingZao (the in-house vendor of JD.com in China) already gets a bunch of downgraded 232L TLC chips from YMTC and is currently preparing 8TB and 16TB SATA III SSDs based on them. These SSDs are aiming for a release in Q4, and that 16TB SSD is going to be priced at ~1899 RMB after tax (Less than 300 USD).

 

[goms]

And something even more insane will appear in the Chinese market. There were rumors about JingZao (the in-house vendor of JD.com in China) already gets a bunch of downgraded 232L TLC chips from YMTC and is currently preparing 8TB and 16TB SATA III SSDs based on them. These SSDs are aiming for a release in Q4, and that 16TB SSD is going to be priced at ~1899 RMB after tax (Less than 300 USD).

What does "downgraded" mean in this context? Is it like a lower grade of NAND?

 

[Hydro01]

What does "downgraded" mean in this context? Is it like a lower grade of NAND?

Yes, similar to NANDs offered by Spectek. And they were probably not suitable for high end NVMe ssds, but still enough for SATA. To be honest, ~300 USD will literally obliterate some needs of 16TB HDDs.

 

[goms]

Yes, and they were probably not suitable for high end NVMe ssds, but still enough for SATA.

But how reliable would they be? I mean, lower grades typically have a higher rate of defects...

 

[Hydro01]

But how reliable would they be? I mean, lower grades typically have a higher rate of defects...

Definitely less reliable than the chips used in in-house branded SSDs, but I think it's probably enough for a steam library. These chips from YMTC tend to be durable. Important data should still be stored in HDDs.

 

[704w]

Would you recommend this as a system drive? Given the lack of DRAM.

 

[DaveLT]

Would you recommend this as a system drive? Given the lack of DRAM.

NVMe SSDs with no DRAM is very different from SATA SSDs without DRAM.
NVMe SSDs are still fast with a competent controller and competent flash. It has both While SATA SSDs without DRAM is slow as hell and prematurely wears the flash out writing the mapping tables to flash all the time while the mapping tables on nvme SSDs are both kept on the flash and DRAM when it boots up but they don't do it constantly.
Therefore, performance is good.

 

[W1zzard]

Definitely less reliable than the chips used in in-house branded SSDs, but I think it's probably enough for a steam library. These chips from YMTC tend to be durable. Important data should still be stored in HDDs.

"Definitely"? Do you have any source or data to back up such a claim?