Lexar has continued to expand their SSD lineup including the addition of their Lexar NM800 Pro which is available with and without a compact heatsink. The NM800 Pro sports an NNOGRIT 1G5236CAA controller which gives it PCIe Gen 4 capabilities and Lexar has it listed with read speeds up to 7450 MB/s and 6500 MB/s for its write speeds, at least on the 2TB model. This lines up well with other Gen 4 SSDs. Lexar is a long-respected brand and they gave their Pro-branded SSD a five-year warranty so I’m excited to put their new drive to the test and see how it performs. Today I will take a closer look to see what secrets it has to offer then we can run it through our test suite to see how it performs to find out if this is the drive to consider next time you are shopping for a new SSD.

Product Name: Lexar Professional NM800 Pro 2TB

Review Sample Provided by: Lexar

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Photos and Features

The last Lexar SSD I had in the office was back in May of 2021 but even in that long and with this being from their Pro line the packaging for the NM800 Pro does still share some of the same styling as the last drive. I would say though that this looks a lot more like a WD Black drive than their past look. The NM800 Pro has a black background with the Lexar brand name in the background with a glossy finish. They have a large picture of the drive right in the center which shows off the drive's styling as well as the model name on it. For trim, they did change things up for the Pro line using gold on the hanging tab up top as well as for the model name which is in the top right corner. To the left of that, they have the Lexar logo and the professional under it in white. Down along the bottom on the front, they let you know that this drive is capable of up to 7500 MB/s read speeds and they have a sticker for the capacity which this is the 2TB model, the largest size. The back of the box touches on three key features up in the top half and repeats the information from the front. Beyond that, the back is filled with legal information but you do get a small window showing you the sticker on the back of the drive so the serial number can be scanned and if buying in a brick-and-mortar store you can double-check the drive capacity as well.

Inside the box, the NM800 Pro comes in a clear plastic clamshell tray that holds it in place and keeps it away from any bumps. The drive comes with a small bundle of paperwork with the warranty information as well. Lexar also always includes a small M.2 screw which is always awesome to find, it’s a lot easier to grab that then finding the screws in the bottom of your motherboard box.

For styling, Lexar has a black PCB but you can hardly see it behind the full-length sticker across the top of the drive. I do like the design of the sticker though, they have the NM800 Pro model name in the top right sitting on a grey with squiggly stripes background. Then there is a gold line down the middle and the bottom half has a black background. This has the Lexar logo in gold as well as Professional in gold with the NM800 Pro model name repeated here in white. It also below that lets you know this is an M.2 2280 length drive which is the standard length, Gen 4 x4 which both Intel and AMD now have on their latest chipsets, and that this is NVMe.

The back of the NM800 Pro is just a flat PCB without any chips or resistors. They did however use this space for another sticker. This one has the standard Lexar look with the black up top and then the rest white. This has the serial number and barcode as well as the part number and drive capacity. It also has all of the normal certification logos as well over on the right side.

Before checking out what is under the sticker to see what Lexar is using for the NM800 Pro I did have to take the sticker off of the top. I was surprised that this sticker s a little thicker and has a similar material to thermal pads used to hold it in place.

With the sticker off we can get a better idea of what is going on. The NM800 Pro has five main chips visible with the two NAND on the far end of the drive farthest away from the M.2 connection. Those two NAND tell us that our 2TB drive is using 1TB NAND each. They have the Longsys brand on them which is the parent company of Lexar after they bought the brand from Micron back in 2017. Each chip is etched with RC72TJB3AA41024 and from what I can tell are rebranded Micron B47R 1TB 176-layer triple-level cell chips. Lexar has the drive listed with a TBW of 2000TB or a little over 1TB a day written every day for five years. On the other end the larger chip is the InnoGrit Rainier IG5236 controller and in between the NM800 Pro has a cache with the Foresee FLXC2002G-N2 memory chip which is DDR4 and has a capacity of 2GB.  The small chip above that looks to be the power management given all of the traces going to it, it looks to say DHFDLB on it but I wasn’t able to confirm.

Test Rig and Procedures

Performance

Before getting into testing the Lexar Professional NM800 Pro 2TB I did check the drive out using CrystalDiskInfo just to confirm that it was connected using the correct interface. It was connected at PCIe 4.0 x4 so we are good there. I also like to do this to document the firmware revision we are running on for testing because those do change from time to time as well.

My first round of testing was to run the Lexar Professional NM800 Pro 2TB through Crystal Disk Mark 8. Sequential testing is usually a best-case scenario and is what companies use for their specifications and on the front of the box to advertise drive speeds which in the case of the NM800 Pro the box doesn’t mention the write speed but does list up to 7500 MB/s for read speeds. The specifications for the NM800 Pro do have the write speeds which are listed as up to 6400 MB/s. Below I have the drives labeled in orange if they are PCIe 4.0 and blue for older 3.0 drives for reference. For the read speeds the NM800 Pro was the fastest of the drives tested at 7155 MB/s which is a little lower than the peak listed on the box. Then for the write speed, it outperformed the specifications at 6629 MB/s which was the third fastest of the drives tested.

While testing in CrystalDiskMark 8 I did also check out the drive’s IOPS performance with the random 4k queue depth of 32 and 1 thread results. I stacked the read and write performance together here because I do believe that the overall drive performance is important, not just one result or the other. The NM800 Pro didn’t do so hot with both read and write speeds in the IOPS being low and putting it at the bottom of the chart.

In AS SSD, I skipped over the standard test because it is very similar to the CrystalDiskMark tests I prefer to check out one of its sub-tests, the copy benchmark. This moves three files, one that is an ISO, one that is a program, and then a game, and times how long each takes. With these being timed, lower is better here. I have all three results stacked to see which drives are best overall. The NM800 Pro didn’t outperform the Venom8 but was right behind it in second place here and was faster with the game files.

Next up with PassMark Performance Test 10, I ran their combined synthetic benchmark to get a look at their DiskMark rating. The NM800 Pro scored a 48063 which wasn’t enough to top the chart but put it right up near the top with a few of the other top-performing Gen 4 x4 drives like the Fury Renegade.

I then changed my focus back over to IOPS performance and ran the NM800 in Anvil’s Storage Benchmark focusing on the 4k queue depth of 16 results from the main test. The read IOPS for the NM800 Pro wasn’t bad at 291390 which was the third-fastest result. Then for the write IOPS, it scored 500,223 which is middle of the pack but still significantly better than some of the drives. When combined the NM800 Pro ended up right in the middle of the pack and running right with the Venom8.

Sticking with Anvil’s Storage Utilities I did a few more tests. Here I wanted to check out how the drive would react to different queue depths so with the file size set to 4K I ran tests ramping up double each time starting at 1 and up to 128 for reads and 64 for writes. This lets us see if the controller gets overloaded. For the read queue depth tests the NM800 Pro started second fastest and did well but ended up in the middle of the pact by a queue depth of 8. After that, however, it took off and was up on its own for the last three tests with none of the other drives even close. For the write queue depth test the NM800 Pro started closer to the bottom of the pack and stayed there until a queue depth of 16 where it accelerated up at the top of the middle of the pack. Three other drives were faster for the last two tests and the Renegade and the M480 Play were over 1000 MB/s faster.

For ATTO Benchmark I set it to a queue depth of just 1 but ramped up the file size slowly to see how it would affect performance. For the read test in ATTO, the NM800 Pro had a trajectory to be in the middle of the pack up until the 256 KB test where its performance dropped around 500 MB/s then it recovered and continued on its way. From 2 MB and on though the NM800 Pro did better than the start of the test indicated and even was the fastest drive in the 24MB range and ties with the Renegade at 6000 MB/s even at the top of the chart. The write speed ATTO test didn’t have the hiccup it had with the read test but did accelerate slower at the 256 KB test. From there it ran with the top few drives but was slightly slower putting it in third for the last 6 results.

Next up I wanted to look at more real-world performance and for this, I started with PCMark 10 which has an overall full system benchmark for storage and then one focused on data storage drives. In the full system drive benchmark, the NM800 Pro scored 2637 which put it in the middle of the pack and behind most of the other Gen 4 drives. Its score in the data drive benchmark was 3755 and that would put it in the bottom half as well.

Next, up for more real-world resting, I did our file transfer tests. You don’t get any more real-world than this. For each drive, I copied the folder filled with files to the drive tested documenting what its transfer rate is near the end of the transfer. I used three file types, movies which are large single files, a folder filled with RAW and JPG photos, and then a folder filled with word documents. Starting with the movie files the NM800 Pro was up in the top of the chart at 2230 MB/s. The Photo transfer test wasn’t as good, with the cache it was quick as first but slowed down later in the test for the 879 MB/s result. Then for the last test, the document test is always extremely demanding with the small file sizes and the NM800 Pro didn’t top the chart here but performed well with its 4.39 MB/s putting it in the middle of the pack.

After running the Lexar Professional NM800 Pro 2TB with a linear read workload for almost a half hour I put it in front of our thermal camera to see how the temperatures were looking. You can see that the controller is the source of most of the heat and that is down on the end near the M.2 drive. This also means the heat is far away from the NAND on the other end as well. The thermal transfer tape was working well on the sticker though and the controller was toasty at 67.7c but as you get farther away it drops almost 10c on each reading.

Overall and Final Verdict

Sure it's been a while since we had a Lexar SSD in the office, but they haven’t missed a beat. The Lexar Professional styling on the NM800 Pro doesn’t require a crazy heatsink to look good (though they did have a model that has one as well). The grey, black, and gold mix that they have going on looks great and should also match any build you use it in if it is visible at all. They are right with the competition on the top end of the market by having a PCIe 4.0 x4 drive and the NM800 Pro impressed in at least some of its tests. Especially when looking at high queue depth read tests where it was in its own class and in the file transfer test where it was in the top two. Beyond that, it was a little hit and miss with it outperforming the promised write speeds in the sequential test but then sitting in the middle of the pack in PCMark 10 and struggling in both IOPS benchmarks.

Lexar did all of that while also breaking the mold and not going with the same Phison controller that everyone else is going with. The NM800 Pro also has a nice mix of capacity options going down to 512 GB and up to 2TB but I wonder how long before they start including 4TB capacities as an option, especially with this being a pro-focused drive where that capacity can be utilized.

As for pricing officially the MSRP for the Lexar Professional NM800 Pro 2TB that I tested today is $279.99 but it has been consistently at $179.99 for three months now. At $179.99 it is $10 less than the Fury Renegade which is a little more consistent in its performance. But the NM800 Pro is still extremely fast and at that price isn’t a bad deal. In fact, if high queue depth read speeds are what you need it is the drive to get. Same with pure large file transfers which it outperformed in multiple tests. Lexar has also paired this drive up with a 5-year warranty which matches the Renegade and is much better than most of the competition.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.