INTRODUCTION

    Although it took some time for NAND controller manufacturers to resolve temperature related issues 2nd generation PCIe Gen5 M.2 NVMe SSDs have been slowly filling the market and even though most of them offer impressive read & write performance competition is always good for the end user. A few months back Lexar also released their NM1090 Pro Gen5 M.2 NVMe SSD and today I'm testing the 2TB capacity.

    For more than 25 years, Lexar has been trusted as a 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.

    The NM1090 Pro by Lexar is currently available in three capacities (1/2/4TB), with and without a heatsink (illuminated) and just like with most 2nd generation Gen5 M.2 NVMe SSDs currently in the market it uses the SM2508 NVMe 2.0 NAND controller by Silicon Motion (6nm lithography) which this time over is paired with Micron's 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash (B58R) and 2GB of LPDDR4 DRAM by FORESEE for the 2TB model. The Silicon Motion SM2508 NVMe 2.0 controller features an quad-core ARM Cortex R8 CPU with support for 4 PCIe lanes of 32Gb/s data transfer speed (Gen5 x4), 8 NAND channels with a speed of up to 3600MT/s per channel and packs various technologies including end to end data path protection, programmable firmware interface, SRAM ECC & CRC parity, Innovative LDPC ECC engine, embedded programmable RAID, real-time full-drive AES 128/256bit encryption, hardware SHA 256/384 and TRNG, secure boot for FW authentication, built-in smart clock-gating mechanism (highly efficient power consumption), ONFI 5.0 and Toggle 5.0 support and TCG Opal 2.0 compliance. When it comes to endurance Lexar reports an MTBF (meantime between failures) of 1.5 million hours for all models, TBW of 700/1400/2800TB for the 1/2/4TB capacities and covers the entire line with a 5-year limited warranty.