INTRODUCTION

   Performance may undeniably be the number 1 reason behind the somewhat recent success/popularity of M.2 NVMe SSDs but their small form factor has certainly also helped quite a bit and so it's no wonder that currently most manufacturers have virtually ceased all development of 2.5" SATA models. On the other hand, SSDs in general are clearly nowhere near to reaching the impressive price/capacity ratio offered by regular mechanical drives and that's something no one expects to change anytime soon. Lexar is among the oldest and most popular manufacturers of portable storage media and even though their acquisition by Longsys back in 2017 was unexpected by many they are still behind many award winning products like the NM610 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD which is here with me today.

   For more than 20 years, Lexar has been a trusted leading global brand of memory solutions. Our award-winning lineup includes memory cards, USB flash drives, card readers, and solid-state drives. With so many options, it’s easy to find the right Lexar solution to fit your needs. All Lexar product designs undergo extensive testing in the Lexar Quality Labs with more than 1,100 digital devices, to ensure performance, quality, compatibility, and reliability. Lexar products are available worldwide at major retail and e-tail stores. For more information or support, visit www.lexar.com.

   The NM610 M.2 SSD by Lexar is the successor to their somewhat popular NM600 model and is currently available in 250GB/500GB/1TB capacities. Just like its predecessor the new NM610 model is also based on the DRAM-less SM2263XT 4-channel high-performance PCIe Gen3 x4 NAND flash controller by Silicon Motion which this time over is paired with 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND Flash memory by Intel (the NM600 came with Micron NAND). Just like other models featuring the SM2263XT controller the NM610 also supports the Host Memory Buffer (HMB) architecture which makes up for the lack of DRAM by using a fraction of your PC's system memory to cache mapping tables (remember that this feature is only supported on versions of Windows 10 launched from 2019 and beyond). This allows the 1TB variant of the NM610 to hit data transfer speeds of up to 2100MB/s in reads and 1600MB/s in writes. Of course, just like in the past the NM610 sports various technologies like Silicon Motion's NANDXtend error-correcting code (ECC) with SRAM ECC, end to end data path protection, global wear-levelling, real time AES 256-bit encryption, SHA 256, TRNG, TCG Opal and IEEE-1667 (Microsoft's eDrive). As for endurance/durability numbers Lexar reports an MTBF of 1.500.000 hours for the entire NM610 line along with an 500TBW for the 1TB model, 250TBW for the 500GB model and 125TBW for the 250GB model (warranty is set at 3 years for the entire line).