Introduction

Lexar has made a name for itself in the portable storage market—they are very well known for their SD cards and USB sticks, so it's natural for them to expand into other areas of flash storage, like consumer SSDs. Lexar was founded as a subsidiary of Micron, but was sold to Longsys in 2017 and has been operating quite independently since.



This is the first review on our new Ryzen-based SSD bench setup. The NM700 is Lexar's flagship M.2 NVMe SSD. We reviewed the NM610 a while ago, which has turned out to be a pretty interesting price/performance option, as its price has come down significantly. While the NM610 uses a Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller, the NM700 is built around a Marvell 88SS1092 "Eldora Plus" controller—it's been a while since we've reviewed a Marvell-powered SSD. The flash chips have been rebranded by Longsys, so we don't know any details about them, other than that they are TLC.

The Lexar NM700 is available in capacities of 256 GB ($50), 512 GB ($80), and 1 TB ($170). Endurance for these models is set at 150 TBW, 300 TBW, and 600 TBW respectively. Lexar includes a five-year warranty.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Lexar NM700 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and two flash chips, a DRAM cache chip is installed, too.

Chip Component Analysis

The eight-channel flash controller is made by Marvell. Once a leader in SSD controller chips, seeing one of their chips on a modern SSD is quite rare. Their 88SS1092 was released around 2018. Internally, it uses a triple-core ARM Cortex R5 controller running at up to 500 MHz.


The two flash chips each have a capacity of 512 GB. They have been rebranded by Longsys, Lexar's parent company, which buys up bulk unpackaged flash chips, tests them in their facilities, and packages them.


A Nanya DDR3-1866 chip provides 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables in.

Test Setup