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 Lexar to expand into other areas of flash storage, like consumer SSDs. Founded as a subsidiary of Micron, Lexar was sold to the Chinese parent company Longsys in 2017 and has been operating independently since.



Today we have on the testbed the Lexar NQ780 4 TB, which is a high-capacity M.2 NVMe drive at a competitive price. This SSD uses the older Innogrit IG5236 controller, paired with QLC NAND flash from Intel. This hardware combo looks a bit like there was some surplus inventory left and Lexar snapped up both at a good price, building the NQ780 from it. As host interface, PCI-Express 4.0 is used. Considering that this is a cost-optimized SSD, it's not unexpected that there is no DRAM cache available.

The Lexar NQ780 is available in capacities of 1 TB ($73), 2 TB ($135) and 4 TB ($240). The endurance is set to 600 TBW, 1200 TBW and 2400 TBW respectively. Lexar includes a five-year warranty with the NQ780 SSD.