The Lexar Play is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2230 form factor, launched in 2023. It is only available in the 1 TB capacity listed on this page. With the rest of the system, the Lexar Play interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the SM2269XT from Silicon Motion, a DRAM cache is not available. Lexar has installed 176-layer TLC NAND flash on the Play, the flash chips are made by Micron. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are handled more quickly. The cache is sized at 300 GB, once it is full, writes complete at 1900 MB/s. Copying data out of the SLC cache (folding) completes at 900 MB/s. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The Play is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 5,200 MB/s and 4,700 MB/s write; random IO reaches 800K IOPS for read and 800K for writes.
The SSD's price at launch is unknown. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Lexar guarantees an endurance rating of 600 TBW, a typical value for consumer SSDs.