Packaging

The Drive

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


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


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


Lexar's sticker on the drive is thick, which would suggest a metal core, like the NM790 and other drives. I took a closer look, it's really just plastic, no metal here. Still, as our thermal testing shows, this level of cooling is sufficient for everything except the worst possible scenarios.

Chip Component Analysis

MaxioTech's MAP1602A controller is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses several Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores.


The four flash chips are YMTC 128-layer 3D TLC NAND.