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 independently since.



We've reviewed the Lexar NM790 4 TB in August and were impressed by its performance and price/performance ratio. While the SSD comes with a heat spreader foil, some users wanted a full-size heatsink, to also ensure compatibility with the Sony PS5. Lexar listened, and is now offering a variant that includes a solid metal heatsink preinstalled. The heatsink version in this review is priced at $280 for 4 TB, which is a $30 increase over the $250 baseline model. There's also a 2 TB model that's sold for $170 (vs $150 without heatsink). Under the hood, nothing has changed—you still get the Maxiotech MAP1602 controller, paired with 232-layer TLC NAND made by YMTC. The choice of TLC is important—nobody wants a 4 TB QLC drive that gets HDD write speeds when heavily loaded. Just like on other MAP1602 designs, a DRAM cache chip is not included.

The Lexar NM790 Heatsink is available in capacities of 1 TB ($90), 2 TB ($170) and 4 TB ($280). Endurance for these models is set to 1000 TBW, 1500 TBW and 3000 TBW, respectively. Lexar includes a five-year warranty with the NM790.