Introduction

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



Today, we're reviewing the Lexar NM710 1 TB, the latest PCI-Express 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD introduced by the company as their new entry-level option. Just like the NM790 that we reviewed a few weeks ago, the NM710 is based on the Maxiotech MAP1602 controller paired with YTMC 3D TLC NAND flash. Unlike the NM790, which uses the newer 232-layer NAND, the NM710 is built with the slightly older and more affordable 128-layer X2-9060 TLC flash. A DRAM cache chip is not included, just like on other MAP1602 designs, to help achieve the highly competitive price point of $89 for 2 TB (yes, 2 TB, not 1 TB).

The Lexar NM710 is available in capacities of 512 GB ($33), 1 TB ($47) and 2 TB ($89) . Endurance for these models is set to 300 TBW, 600 TBW and 1200 TBW, respectively. Lexar includes a five-year warranty with the NM710.

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.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• M.2 drives are tested with a fan blowing on them; that is, except for the results investigating uncooled behavior on the thermal testing page.

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 600 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 80% of their capacity
• Partitions are properly aligned.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.