Surprise Storage!
We had all of our storage stuff figured out, right? So what are we doing here? Well, long story short, when looking at storage options, I reached out to Lexar along with Patriot. Well, they weren’t able to do anything, Patriot stepped in and sent out drives. Then out of nowhere, I had a package show up that I didn’t know was coming, and it was from Lexar. They apparently were able to find a drive for us, and it was a monster. They sent over the Lexar NM790 in the 8TB capacity. Perfect for installing any and all games without worrying about running out of room. So our surprise package turned into a nice storage upgrade for Project Momentum, and lucky for us our motherboard could fit it without having to shift anything around! A big thank you to Lexar for their support as well!
So what is the NM790 all about? This drive has been around for a few years now, filling up part of Lexar’s higher-end PCIe 4.0 lineup. It is available in a 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and an 8TB drive we have here. It is a DRAM-less design and has the MaxioTech MAP1602A controller. That is paired up with YMTC 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. Together, it has sequential read speeds up to 7000 MB/s and write speeds of up to 6200 MN/s which is down slightly on the larger 8TB model vs the smaller capacities. The 8TB has 850K read IOPs and 900K write IOPS. The 8TB model isn’t listed in the specifications for total bytes written, but the smaller 4TB is 3000 TBW, I would imagine that would be higher here. It also has a 5-year warranty, which is important, especially given how much drives cost these days.
The drive will be hidden behind the heatsink on the TRX50-SAGE WIFI, but the silver and black branding across the top would be a perfect match for our blacked-out build. It’s kind of a shame, I do miss the days when we could see the SSDs in builds, and they didn’t need cooling, but that is long gone now.
That’s it for the components going into the Momentum build. Next time we will get it all put together and touch on a few issues that I ran into when putting everything together. On top of that, we will put the new build to the test and see how it performs. We know it will outperform the system it is replacing, but will it address the issues that I was running into?
