Overall and Final Verdict
The SSD market is especially competitive and it is always changing because other than the top end it is all about the price to performance. So small price changes make all of the difference. The NM610 isn’t aiming for the high end, though being an M.2 NVMe drive it is by default a faster drive than most. I found that in my testing it best compared with the Crucial P1 and Western Digital Blue SN500, the newer SN550 is a touch faster. The SN610 is a DRAM-Less design that nearly all of the drives its price range are as well and it uses TLC NAND which while I consider it a downside given that TLC NAND does have a short lifespan, it does fit right with the other drives as well. Performance was a mixed bag, overall like I said it Ran with the P1 and the SN500 though I do think If I had a smaller 500 GB SN550 it may run with it on most tests. Performance is about half of what you can see with new high-end PCIe 4.0 drives but would be a huge improvement over any SATA based drive or any non-NVMe drive in general. There were a few situations where the performance fell off, namely when I tested using Passmark Performance Test 9’s advanced disk benchmark where the drive was noticeably slower than the other drives. It also didn’t do well when I ramped up the queue depth but it was the fastest drive tested in the low queue depth tests.
So being a mid-range NVME drive, like I said before the pricing is extremely important. As of writing this (and this stuff changes often) the Lexar NM610 is selling for $69.99 on Newegg. The Crucial P1 sells for the same price and the NM610 is a little faster. The WD Blue SN500 is the same price as well and the SN550 is $8 more. Given that both of our WD Blue drives were the higher capacity 1TB models when tested and higher capacities perform a little better. I actually think the NM610 ends up being a good performing option at the $69.99 price point. Lexar did a great job of pricing this perfectly. The NM610 isn’t for your high end builds, but for a more budget-focused build, this is perfect to get an NVMe drive at a good price. The 1TB NM610 looks to be an even better value at $115 as well, priced below the P1 and the WD Blue drives and you also get twice the TBW (TB written) for drive longevity.
Live Pricing: HERE
