Introduction

Lexar has made a name for itself in the portable storage market—they are deservedly well known for 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 independently since.



Today's review covers the Lexar NM1090 Pro 4 TB, which is the company's new flagship drive supporting the fast PCI-Express 5.0 standard. The large 4 TB capacity variant offers tons of storage and is a great choice for people who need more than 2 TB from their M.2 SSD. Under the hood, we found the new Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, which we've seen on other recent SSDs. Silicon Motion has been taking notes during Phison's Gen 5 market dominance and engineered a controller that's optimized with power consumption in mind—to reduce the heat output—which lets them run without a noisy active cooling solution. The NAND flash chips are Micron B58R 3D TLC with 232-layers. A DRAM cache chip is included, too, for the mapping tables of the SSD, using 4 GB of LPDDR4-3733.

The Lexar NM1090 Pro is available in capacities of 1 TB ($130), 2 TB ($210) and 4 TB ($390). Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW, 1400 TBW and 2800 TBW, respectively. Lexar offers a five-year warranty with the NM1090 Pro SSD.