Storage

Lexar NM700 Review

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July 24, 2020 6 Min Read
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Lexar’s latest M.2 NVMe SSD is here and claims to deliver transfer rates of up to 3500MB/s. Is this storage drive worth considering?


Product on Review: NM700 SSD
Manufacturer & Sponsor: Lexar
Street Price: 1TB Model – UK: £190 US: $200 USD

The SATA-based SSD market has now become quite stagnant and saturated. Prices have tumbled in recent years which has been great for mainstream users who can benefit from a slice of solid state action. However, with the arrival of AMD and Intel platforms supplying generous allocation for NVMe technology and M.2 pricing having also dropped significantly, never has there been a better time to breach that 550MB/s threshold and benefit from a faster storage drive.

In the spotlight today is Lexar’s new NM700; an M.2 SSD using NVMe technology and PCI Express Gen3 x4. Lexar claims the NM700 will reach speeds in excess of 3000MB/s. Let’s find out if these claims hold true!



Lexar on their NM700
Move beyond the pace of SATA SSD’s with an upgrade to the Lexar NM700 and get 6.5x the speed of SATA-based SSD3. With the PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe, and speeds of up to 3500MB/s read and 2000MB/s write, you will experience improved performance from boot ups to shut downs giving you maximum efficiency without constant slowdowns. The NM700 is built with 3D NAND flash inside.

Technical Specifications


Below are the technical specifications surrounding the NM700:

Capacity
256GB, 512GB, 1TB

Form Factor
M.2 2280

Interface
PCIe Gen3x4

Speed
256GB sequential read up to 3500MB/s read, sequential write up to 1200MB/s1
IOPS: up to 200/242K

512GB sequential read up to 3500MB/s read, sequential write up to 2000MB/s1
IOPS: up to 332/275K

1TB sequential read up to 3500MB/s read, sequential write up to 2000MB/s1
IOPS: up to 293/272K

NAND flash
3D TLC

Operating Temperature
0° to 70° C

Storage Temperature
-40° C to 85° C

Shock Resistant
1500G, duration 0.5ms, Half Sine Wave

Vibration Resistant
10~2000Hz, 1.5mm, 20G, 1 Oct/min, 30min/axis(X,Y,Z)

TBW
256GB: 150TB, 512GB: 300TB, 1TB: 600TB

DWPD
256GB: 0.32, 512GB: 0.32, 1TB: 0.32

MTBF
1,500,000 Hours

Dimension (L x W x H)
80 x 22 x 2.25 mm / 3.15” x 0.87” x 0.09”

Weight
9g

Closer Look



NM700 arrives in a small packet which shows a depiction of the drive with accompanying information surrounding the capacity, form factor and expected transfer rates. Aside from a warranty leaflet, the SSD is scarce of bundled accessories. However, our small M.2 drive does sit within a plastic case to ensure no damage occurs during the delivery process.


NM700 conforms to the M.2 form factor and more specifically the 2280 size. Aesthetics are still an important factor on such a dainty product as an M.2 SSD and since this drive may well be on full display for users with a side panel on their chassis, it’s great to see an attractive design which is likely to coordinate well with the rest of the system. As you’ll have seen on the first page of this review, the NM700 blends in very well with the styling on our MSI Z490 UNIFY motherboard.

Lexar’s NM700 is based on the Marvell 88SS1092 NVMe controller which offers eight-channels and is a triple-core variant (ARM Cortex R5). This drive also uses twin 16nm TLC 3D NAND.

Since NM700 utilises PCI Express Gen 3 x4, we expect strong sequential read/write performance from our drive – using the Marvell controller enables speeds of over 3GB/s.

Benchmarks: Anvil Pro

Anvil Pro from Anvil Storage utilities is one of the most popular storage benchmarking utilities today thanks to the large suit of tests available. You can test pretty much anything from Read/write Speed to IOPs with many variables to tweak allowing you to get either a single or host of results to compare with other likeminded enthusiasts. In our test we ran the standard suite 5 times, subtracting both the highest and lowest scores and determined the final result from the average of the remaining three results.

Benchmarks: AS SSD

AS SSD Benchmark is a straightforward tool for measuring the speed of your SSD drive.

Simply launch the program, choose your drive, click Start, and it’ll test your SSD’s read and write speed in a variety of ways, delivering a score for each when it’s done. And if that’s not enough, there are also additional file copy and compression-related benchmarks available from the Tools menu. (The author’s support page is German only, but if you need further English explanations then there’s a thread on the program at the OCZ Technology forum.).


Benchmarks: ATTO

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.


Benchmarks: AIDA64

AIDA64 Product Page
This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example — with HyperThreading disabled — the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.


Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is an open source disk drive benchmark tool for Microsoft Windows. Based on Microsoft’s MIT-licensed Diskspd tool, this graphical benchmark is commonly used for testing the performance of solid-state storage. It works by reading and writing through the filesystem in a volume-dependent way. It generates read/write speeds in sequential and random positions with varying numbers of queues and threads.


Conclusion


Internal SSDs are a fairly new venture for Lexar, but we’re pleased to report their efforts in this field have left us impressed.

We found NM700 to be a solid M.2 SSD which is able to deliver some good numbers in terms of sequential read/write and IOPS. This drive provided us with some consistent results right across the board when up against the competition. Putting such a drive next to a SATA-based SSD will highlight the substantial benefits to moving over to a PCI-Express Gen3 x4 option. The performance increase is significant and is a worthwhile consideration for enthusiasts wanting to tap into more efficient workflow.


The NM700 should be available to buy soon and will arrive in 128GB through to 1TB capacities. Our 1TB model will be available for £190 GBP and $200 USD. This pricing puts it in line with other rival storage drives, however it should be noted that Lexar provide a 5-year warranty which should sweeten the deal considerably.

Backed by impressive transfer rates, the NM700 is a lightning quick storage solution that is definitely worth considering!

Pros
+ Excellent overall performance
+ Easy on the eye
+ Features LDPC (Parity Check)
+ Reasonably priced
+ 5 Years Warranty

Cons
– None apparent


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