Lexar NM800 Pro w/ Heatsink 2 TB

[W1zzard]

The Lexar NM800 Pro is a high-end SSD that plays in the same league as Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850. It comes with an excellent heatsink that ensures there's no thermal throttling, no matter what you throw at the drive. Pricing is highly competitive too, only $130 for 2 TB.

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[Dragokar]

Thanks for the review.

There is a tiny flaw, you wrote (or copied)

On the PCB you'll find the controller and two flash chips, a DRAM cache is not present.

A single Foresee LPDDR4x chip provides 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

But your pictures and text do show the dram chip.

Cheers.

 

[dgianstefani]

Thanks for the review.

There is a tiny flaw, you wrote (or copied)





But your pictures and text do show the dram chip.

Cheers.

Fixed.

 

[Chrispy_]

Not too shabby for the money, though the NAND market is in freefall right now, so how up-to-date are the prices of the comparison SSDs in the performance/$ chart?

I'm not in the US, but it looks like the SN770 2TB is $10 cheaper at Newegg for a faster drive, on the bold (and possibly incorrect) assumption that the 2TB SN770 performs similarly to the 1TB variant you tested.

I'm still buying SN570s for the most part, not because they're the best, but because they're decent enough and the best performance/$ - given that every version of the NV2 I've ever encountered has been a bait-and-switch to QLC and performs like garbage if you actually write to it in any significant way.

 

[bonehead123]

#JustSayNo2QLC#

the NAND market is in freefall right now

Yippee...finally ! It seems that the criminally insane, greed-fueled wallet-gouging of the pandemic is finally reaching at least 1 segment of the pc parts industry, now if only it could happen to the GPU side yea right....

As for the drives themselves, I'll stick with the 2TB 850x's that dropped like a rock about a month ago. I bought a bunch of them for some upcoming builds, but returned most of them & reordered even moar at the newly lowered prices this week !

 

[RegaeRevaeb]

#JustSayNo2QLC#

Yippee...finally ! It seems that the criminally insane, greed-fueled wallet-gouging of the pandemic is finally reaching at least 1 segment of the pc parts industry, now if only it could happen to the GPU side yea right....

As for the drives themselves, I'll stick with the 2TB 850x's that dropped like a rock about a month ago. I bought a bunch of them for some upcoming builds, but returned most of them & reordered even moar at the newly lowered prices this week !

Wait, wait, wait... holdup. Those 850s are WD... WD... BLACK drives! I mean, that's like, you know, not... ALL WHITE, like 186 per cent, Bonehead-approved, Aryan-jealous, bleach-inducing, WHITE. I think I'm going to buy a lottery ticket today. ;-)

 

[bonehead123]

Wait, wait, wait... holdup. Those 850s are WD... WD... BLACK drives! I mean, that's like, you know, not... ALL WHITE, like 186 per cent, Bonehead-approved, Aryan-jealous, bleach-inducing, WHITE. I think I'm going to buy a lottery ticket today. ;-)

Ah, but that's the thing here.... WD calls them "BLACK", and they are actually, like, you know..."BLACK", both figuratively & literally, so that's ok...

And it would appear, from the wording of your post, that you may be trying to turn this into something that it is not...so the shun's on you now......

 

[Denver]

Wow... Do Samsung SSDs perform so poorly in this WinRar benchmark or is it just inconsistency caused by hardware or software difference in the testing routine?

 

[W1zzard]

Wow... Do Samsung SSDs perform so poorly in this WinRar benchmark or is it just inconsistency caused by hardware or software difference in the testing routine?

Great question, everything was tested the same way, same everything. This test is VERY difficult for some Controller designs because it issues a lot of small IOs, which is why I’m running it in the first place. Maybe some Samsung algorithm is having a hard time dealing with the load, especially considering we’re testing with 80% disk full.
On holiday right now, so can’t retest anything, will try to look into it next week

 

[S73fan]

A little off topic, but is it possible to have reviews for HDDs, for example I am interested in the WD141KFGX, but I can't find reviews from reliable sources.

 

[W1zzard]

A little off topic, but is it possible to have reviews for HDDs, for example I am interested in the WD141KFGX, but I can't find reviews from reliable sources.

Is there anything actually worth testing? They are slow, but cheap for the TB

 

[Chrispy_]

Is there anything actually worth testing? They are slow, but cheap for the TB

The only thing I care about with HDDs is whether they are CMR or SMR, and manufacturers (despite promising to identify them) are doing a terrible job of making that clear.

I rarely buy mechanical drives at retail now, but whenever I do I find the process of individually Googling each model to find out if is infected with shingles a rather tedious and irritating step. SMR or CMR is quite literally the deciding factor in what a HDD is suitable for, and that data is woefully lacking in retail listings where it actually matters.

 

[S73fan]

Is there anything actually worth testing? They are slow, but cheap for the TB

It depends on what you use them for, I personally use them to archive movies, and there the speed doesn't matter. But 14TB is plenty of space, at least for me.

The only thing I care about with HDDs is whether they are CMR or SMR, and manufacturers (despite promising to identify them) are doing a terrible job of making that clear.

On the WD website, it is clearly shown what the disks are - CMR or SMR.

Designed with CMR technology for medium or large-sized businesses in RAID-optimized NAS systems with up to 24 bays. Perfect for archiving, sharing and handling high-intensity workloads.

 

[Chrispy_]

On the WD website, it is clearly shown what the disks are - CMR or SMR.

shown only for some of their disks.
Retailers across the globe sell OEM drives not listed on WD's website - white label, for example - those don't even exist on the WD website.

Outside of the four main consumer retail "branded" model ranges of mechanical drive (so black, red, blue, purple), WD seem to omit CMR or SMR info from most of their offerings.
Worse than that, the surveillance drives that are typically SMR are CMR, and the WD Red (non pro, non plus) drives are NAS drives with SMR (which is so dumb).

I couldnt find a single external drive with recording technology listed like they promised:​

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/products/external-drives/wd-my-book-usb-3-0-hdd​

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/products/external-drives/wd-elements-desktop-usb-3-0-hdd​

​

and that issue continues with portable 2.5" variants...​

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/products/portable-drives/wd-my-passport-usb-3-0-hd​

​

Laptop 2.5" drives are a clusterfuck. Some are listed, some are not. This one has a blank field for "recording tecnology" and the product code isn't one of the named SMR/CMR models above the specs table.​

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/products/internal-drives/wd-blue-mobile-sata-hdd#WD5000LPZX​

See, it should be easy, clear, transparent, and across all hard drives. It absolutely is not and that sucks because an SMR drive is godawful in many situations. That wall of text hardlining the failures of WD is just one company. All manufacturers are guilty and WD aren't even the worst!

 

[chrcoluk]

First drive I have seen at this price point that has DRAM, and has TLC. But wary of bait and switch as its not an in house manufacturer.

 

[S73fan]

shown only for some of their disks.
Retailers across the globe sell OEM drives not listed on WD's website - white label, for example - those don't even exist on the WD website.

Outside of the four main consumer retail "branded" model ranges of mechanical drive (so black, red, blue, purple), WD seem to omit CMR or SMR info from most of their offerings.
Worse than that, the surveillance drives that are typically SMR are CMR, and the WD Red (non pro, non plus) drives are NAS drives with SMR (which is so dumb).

I couldnt find a single external drive with recording technology listed like they promised:​

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/products/external-drives/wd-my-book-usb-3-0-hdd​

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/products/external-drives/wd-elements-desktop-usb-3-0-hdd​

​

and that issue continues with portable 2.5" variants...​

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/products/portable-drives/wd-my-passport-usb-3-0-hd​

​

Laptop 2.5" drives are a clusterfuck. Some are listed, some are not. This one has a blank field for "recording tecnology" and the product code isn't one of the named SMR/CMR models above the specs table.​

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/products/internal-drives/wd-blue-mobile-sata-hdd#WD5000LPZX​

See, it should be easy, clear, transparent, and across all hard drives. It absolutely is not and that sucks because an SMR drive is godawful in many situations. That wall of text hardlining the failures of WD is just one company. All manufacturers are guilty and WD aren't even the worst!

I understand your concerns, but I can tell you that when a disk from our NAS failed, the sysadmin replaced it with one that was SMR, I told him it was not a good idea, and he replied - what does it matter? And by the way the disk is still working, 2 years later without a problem
p.s. I stop here with offtopic

 

[Chrispy_]

I understand your concerns, but I can tell you that when a disk from our NAS failed, the sysadmin replaced it with one that was SMR, I told him it was not a good idea, and he replied - what does it matter? And by the way the disk is still working, 2 years later without a problem
p.s. I stop here with offtopic

Depends on the NAS, how it's used, and how the arrays are RAIDed.

SMR only really sucks for NAS/SAN performance when the disks are full and when you're dealing with a half a petabyte of data like I do, most arrays are nearly full because the cost of having hundreds of terabytes of excess capacity sitting there empty is huge.

For consumer use, SMR will work fine for a game drive or backup drive, but if you try and use it for video editing or run any kind of application on it (for example, a NAS OS) then everything grinds to a halt. I'm not going to argue about why they're unsuitable for use, because class-action lawsuits were won, proving that they are unsuitable for some use cases. It's one of the reasons drive manufacturers are supposed to state what technology they are using, otherwise they set themselves up for an automatic loss in yet another class-action lawsuit, because there's legal precedent now.