INTRODUCTION

   The recent introduction of the Z590 based motherboards and the 11th generation CPUs by Intel has brought even more players in the NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4 compatible market. Still only a very tiny percentage out there has a compatible motherboard either from AMD or Intel so it should be quite a while before NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4 SSD sales climb, at least to a point where Gen3 models will feel threatened (even though in all likelihood they will just get replaced in the long run by Gen4 and above models - backwards compatibility and all). This of course means we should see quite a few PCIe Gen3 SSDs get released in 2021 and above and one of them is the brand new NM620 model by Lexar which reached the lab roughly 2 weeks ago.

   For more than 25 years, Lexar has been a trusted leading global brand of memory solutions. Our award-winning lineup includes memory cards, USB flash drives, card readers, solid-state drives and DRAM. 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.

     Just like both its predecessors (NM600/NM610) the NM620 SSD (currently available in 256GB/512GB/1TB capacities) is based on the DRAM-less Shasta+ (IG5216) 4-channel PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe 1.4 NAND flash controller by Innogrit which this time is paired with 96-Layer 3D TLC NAND Flash memory by Micron. Exactly like controllers by other manufacturers to make up for the lack of onboard DRAM the Shasta+ (IG5216) controller uses the Host Memory Buffer (HMB) architecture which basically takes up 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 combination of hardware and software/firmware allows the 1TB variant of the NM620 to reach data transfer speeds of up to 3300MB/s in reads and 3000MB/s in writes with a TWB (terabytes written) of 500TB (125TB for the 256GB model and 250TB for the 512GB). Needless to say, the Innogrit Shasta+ (IG5216) supports various technologies like LDPC (low-density parity check) error-correction with SRAM ECC, programmable RAID, smart cache, AES 256-bit encryption, SHA3 256, ONFI 4.1 and Toggle 4.0. Finally Lexar reports an MTBF of 1.5 million hours and covers the entire NM620 line of SSDs with a 5-year limited warranty.