Lexar NM790 4TB SSD Review

Lexar's NM790 comes in a black and silver finished box with a clear image of the drive on the front. Above the image and to the right, the drive's name is printed in silver which makes it stand out. Below the image of the drive is the Sequential read speed rating and to the right of this is a sticker highlighting the 4TB capacity.

The rear of the box has a narrow clear plastic window to display the drive above which are multilingual notes about the drive's performance and power consumption. Under these are multi-lingual instructions to find additional warranty and drive information. To the left-hand side of the window, there are yet more multilingual notes, this time talking about the drives speed rating.

Lexar's 4TB NM790 drive is built on a single-sided M.2 2280 format. The front of the drive is covered by a label that incorporates a metal foil to help get rid of the heat from the drive but it is very thin, but still, it's better than nothing. The rear of the drive has a standard label.

Being a single-sided design, all the major components sit on one side of the PCB. Along with the controller, there are four packages of 232-Layer 3D TLC NAND (coded Longsys RY18TAA48421024).

The NM790 uses a controller that is new to us, the MAP1602A from Maxiotech. The 1602A is a 4-channel, DRAM-less design built on a 12nm TSMC process with ARM Cortex-R5 architecture. Unlike many other DRAM-less design's the 1602A uses a 2400 MT/s interface speed. The controller supports up to 4TB of TLC 3D MLC/TLC/QLC NAND and uses MAXIO Agile ECC 3 Technology for error correction.

Lexar’s SSD management utility is called SSD Dash. It’s not as fully featured or flashy as some of its competitors, but it does offer all the basic information you might need to keep an eye on your drive in an easy-to-understand way. It also supports Secure Erase and data migration.

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