Introduction

Lexar has made a name for itself in the portable storage market—they are very well known for their SD cards and USB sticks, 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 more independently since.



Today, we have for review the Lexar NM610 SSD in the 1 TB variant, which is the company's current flagship. It comes in the M.2 form factor, using a fast PCI-Express x4 3.0 NVMe connection to interface with the rest of the system. Under the hood, Lexar is using a Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller paired with Micron 64-layer 3D TLC flash. For cost reasons, a DRAM cache module is not installed.

The Lexar NM610 is available in capacities of 250 GB ($48), 500 GB ($115), and 1 TB ($155). Endurance for these models is set at 125 TBW, 250 TBW, and 500 TBW respectively. Lexar includes a three-year warranty.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Lexar NM610 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and four flash chips; DRAM cache is not available.

Chip Component Analysis

We've encountered the Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller on several M.2 SSDs before. It is a fairly recent model with four flash channels, solid performance, and support for DRAM-less TLC.


The four flash chips are Micron 64-layer 3D TLC NAND; they have been rebranded by Lexar and now look a little bit like Toshiba chips. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.