Lexar Professional NM800 Pro Heatsink 2TB SSD Review

It's probably fair to say that Lexar is better known for its range of memory cards, USB flash drives and card readers than they are for SSDs, but they have a small range of M.2 NVMe drives with both PCIe Gen3 and Gen4 interfaces. The flagship of the range is the Professional NM800 Pro, a PCIe Gen4x4 drive which is available in two versions, one with a heatsink (our review sample) and a standard model.

Lexar's Professional NM800 Pro uses a controller we don't see too often, InnoGrit's Rainier IG5236 which is combined with another rarely seen item, namely Longsys NAND. Longsys are Lexar’s parent company and the 2TB Professional NM800 Pro uses two 3D TLC 176-layer NAND packages.

As the name implies the heatsink version of the Professional NM800 Pro comes with a well-designed heatsink preinstalled. It is compatible with PS5 and should you want to use it with a PC motherboard cooling solution, Lexar has made it easy to remove. The heatsink is a two-part design with four Philips micro-screws holding it together and thoughtfully Lexar has gone for a thermal pad option between the heatsink and drive so there is no thermal paste gluing parts together.

Lexar rate the Sequential performance for the 2TB version of the Professional NM800 Pro as up to 7,500MB/s for reads and up to 6,500MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite hit those maximum figures with test results of 6,970MB/s and 6,200MB/s for reads and writes respectively. That tested read result of 6,970MB/s is the fastest ATTO read figure we've seen to date for a consumer drive. Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark saw confirmation of the official figures using the benchmark's default setting with a best read figure of 7,535MB/s with writes at 6,586MB/s. As with the ATTO read score, the CrystalDiskMark Sequential score is the fastest we've seen to date.

Oddly Lexar doesn't mention the 4K performance of the Professional NM800 Pro on the specification page for the drive on their website. The best figures we saw with our four treaded testing was 355,040 IOPS (QD16) for reads and 265,849 IOPS (QD16) for writes. However, with the more aggressive settings of CrystalDiskMark 8 Peak Performance Profile, we saw speeds of 627,176 IOPS and 501,461 IOPS for reads and writes respectively.

The Professional NM800 Pro Heatsink is supported by Lexar's SSD Dash. It might not have the funky GUI of some of its competitors' utilities but does have all the basics to help you maintain the drive including the ability to perform firmware updates, Secure Erase and data migration.

We found the 2TB Lexar Professional NM800 Pro Heatsink on Amazon UK for £231.34 (inc VAT) HERE

Pros

• Overall performance.
• Endurance.
• Heatsink design.

Cons

• Write speeds in some benchmark tests.

KitGuru says: Lexar's flagship Gen4 drive performs very well especially when it comes to sequential read performance, in some of our testing it was the fastest drive we've seen to date. PCIe Gen4 drives are known for producing high temperatures when pushed but the heatsink on the Lexar Professional NM800 Pro Heatsink does a really good job of keeping the drive cool.

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