Lexar Professional NM800 Pro Heatsink 2TB SSD Review

The Professional NM80 Pro Heatsink comes in a black and red finished box with a clear image of the drive on the front. Above the image and to the right the drive's name is picked out in gold 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 with the capacity of the drive.

The rear of the box has a narrow clear plastic window to display the drive above which are multilingual instructions to find additional warranty and drive information. Each side of the window has multilingual notes about the drives speed rating.

Lexar's Professional NM800 Pro Heatsink is built on a single-sided M.2 2280 format. The aluminium heatsink has been designed to fit into the storage container of PS5. Should you want to use the drive in a desktop PC, the heatsink is easily removed. The two-piece design is held together by four Philips micro-screws and Lexar has kindly used thermal pads on either side of the drive so there is no thermal gunk gluing down the drive making life a little awkward.

Removing the heatsink and the product label reveals the drive components. The drive uses an InnoGrit IG5236 controller which is the high-end client solution of InnoGrit's RainerPC family. Built using a 12nm FinFET CMOS process, the IG5236 is an 8-channel NVMe 1.4 controller using a 32-bit ARM Cortex R5 quad-core processor. It supports up to 8TB of SLC, MLC, TLC or QLC NAND flash with either ONFI 4.1 or Toggle 2.0/3.0/4.0 at speeds up to 1200MT/s.

Sitting between it and the NAND is a Forsee 2GB DDR4L DRAM IC (FLXC2002G-N2). The 2TB drive uses two packages of Longsys labelled 3D TLC 176-layer NAND. Longsys may be a name new to you, but they are in fact, Lexar’s parent company.

 
Lexar’s SSD utility goes under the name of 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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