By The QLC NAND in the Lexar NQ780 tested here appears to be new to the party, based on its faster native-write performance and significantly higher TBW rating. I love it when new things appear. How exciting!
Features
The PCIe 4.0 transfer protocol is used by Lexar’s NQ780, NVMe 2.0, 2280 (22 mm wide, 80 mm long) SSD (x4). Additionally, it employs layered QLC NAND, as the Q in the model name could indicate. The Innogrit IG5326 controller is used. There is no DRAM on board since the architecture leverages the host memory buffer (system memory) for primary caching.
The NQ780 is covered by a five-year warranty from Lexar, or 600 TBW (terabytes that can be written) per terabyte of storage. If you write more than that (which is improbable), the warranty will expire, but the drive won’t necessarily be affected. When the proportion used hits 100 percent, you will still be able to write more, but you won’t lose any data.
In addition, there is an extremely high TBW rating for QLC NAND, which is typically between 200 and 250 TBW. That strengthens my conviction that this is a novel form of QLC.
Price
You could get a 4TB (tested) NQ780 for $290, a 2TB for $150, and a 1TB for $80 at the time of writing. That’s not very low, but it’s about average for cheap SSDs.
Speed
Faster NAND, especially QLC NAND like in Lexar’s NQ780, usually makes me happy. Although that might be a controller trick, it almost tripled what I typically see with quad-level cell flash memory writes.
Every NVMe SSD is quick. Nevertheless, in terms of performance, the 4TB NQ780 came in around the center. In my tests, it placed third out of six HMB/QLC SSDs, thirteenth out of thirty-two HMB SSDs, and 39th out of fifty-seven NVMe SSDs of all kinds. However, in the sequential tests conducted by CrystalDiskMark 8, it more than held its own.
Although the NQ780’s CrystalDiskMark 8 random performance was decent, it lagged much behind the WD Black SN7100.
The Kingston NV3, the quickest drive on the list, was within shouting distance of the NQ780, which took just over two and a half minutes to write 450 GB. The Teamgroup MP44Q is the other. Keep in mind that the WD employs TLC NAND.
The NQ780 isn’t the fastest drive on this list, but it’s more than fast enough for most uses, and it has a native write rate—secondary write when the SLC cache is full—that’s two to four times faster than other QLC NAND SSDs that I’ve seen. Take a look at the picture below.
Should the Lexar NQ780 be purchased?
With its new faster-off-cache QLC NAND, I wouldn’t say no to the NQ780 at the appropriate pricing. It’s not the fastest kid on the block, but it’s reasonably priced.
