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
