By Overall, the NM1090 Pro from Lexar is a speedy SSD. Although it costs about the same as the faster competitors, it is a little slow for a PCIe 5.0 SSD with DRAM. As a result, it falls squarely into the buy at the right discount category.
Features
The NM1090 Pro’s specifications, which include a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, 232-layer TLC NAND, 1GB of DRAM per TB of capacity, and PCIe 5.0, sound amazing. In order to offset its five-year warranty, the 2280 (22 mm wide by 80 mm long) form-factor drive also has a somewhat higher than typical 700TBW per TB of capacity rating.
The guaranteed terabytes that can be written to an SSD before it enters read-only mode is known as TBW. These somewhat sarcastic figures, however, are intended to prevent warranty abuse, such as the usage of consumer SSDs in servers with high traffic.
Cost
We received quotes from Lexar of $180 for the 1TB drive, $270 for the 2TB drive, and $495 for the 4TB drive that we tested. However, Amazon was selling the 1TB and 2TB capacities for $139.49 and $224.49, respectively. Remarkably, the 2TB model with a sturdy heatsink cost just $219.49.
All of those costs are about the same for a DRAM-based PCIe 5.0, NVMe SSD. To put it another way, it’s not a huge deal, but it’s also not too expensive compared to the competitors. That implies that performance is everything.
Speed
Though once more, not quite as quick as many of the PCIe 5.0/DRAM competition, the NM1090 Pro did well overall. Additionally, there were sporadic irregularities, such as our 450GB write’s poor speed and AS SSD’s wildly inconsistent results.
In one test session, we did observe some wildly disparate performances, but that was probably due to the condition of our test bed at the time, which was recuperating from a failed R-Drive Image backup.
Is the Lexar NM1090 Pro a good purchase?
Most of the NM1090 Pro’s performance was as promised. However, it lags behind the Samsung 9100 Pro, XPG Mars 980, and numerous other PCIe 5.0 SSDs on our must-buy list due to its slow 450GB write and somewhat poor synthetic benchmark scores. However, at a reasonable cost…
