Lexar Professional NM710 1TB, M.2 2280 / M-Key / PCIe 4.0 x4

MaXio seems to be taking over the affordable Gen4 SSD market with their MAP1602 NAND controller and for people looking for just that it’s a good thing. For good or bad however not everyone is looking to get their hands on an affordable drive, some people are actually waiting for more Gen5 SSDs to make their appearance and obviously that’s not happening. It’s not just Gen5 SSDs however, even the top-end Gen4 market has stood all but still for the last year or so and that too is not good. The same can be said for capacities since manufacturers seem to think that 4TB is more than plenty and well, it’s not. Yes, mostly enthusiasts and professionals will set their sights on 8TB models and so manufacturers may not see the benefit in releasing them but again this is something that needs to happen. All these aside however the NM710 by Lexar is still a valid upgrade for people looking to get something faster than a SATA III or even an Gen3 SSD (alas not by a large margin for the latter). Both performance and endurance numbers are good (always for the price) and the 5-year limited warranty obviously goes a long way. With a current price tag set at just USD47.99 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 56.13Euros inside the EU (Amazon.de) the NM710 1TB Gen4 SSD by Lexar is priced extremely well. At the end of the day just like with most things what it all comes down to is just what your needs are and just how much you’re willing to spend and so if you happen to be a casual user looking for an affordable Gen4 SSD I strongly recommend giving the Lexar NM710 a chance.

While much attention is directed towards the Lexar NM790, which delivers exceptional high-end performance at an incredible price point, it's worth noting that Lexar has also recently also unveiled the NM710 SSD. This particular SSD is designed for the entry-level market, catering to individuals seeking for a drive at the lowest possible cost, while still achieving decent performance levels. Just like the NM790 and other similar drives, Lexar opted for Maxiotech's MAP1602 controller, which has gained a lot of fame recently, because it is a high-end design that achieves outstanding real-life performance, at excellent pricing, even without DRAM cache. While these high-end variants are using the recently-released YMTC 232-layer NAND flash, the NM710 is built with the company's older and more affordable 128-layer TLC NAND. We confirmed that it is not using QLC. As expected, a DRAM cache is not included, ensuring the low price point can be achieved.

With the Crucial T700 being our first PCIe 5.0 drive to come into the office, I’ve been really excited to see what the new drives are capable of and the T700 does offer insane raw performance when it comes to sequential file tests. The same goes for our real-world file transfer tests where the T700 has shown the limitations of the test setup, writing faster than our base SSD can read. The same goes for its performance in PC Mark 10 which is also real-world focused with its mix of real-world tests, the T700 completely broke the scaling of our results compared to everything else tested. But like with the PCIe 4.0 drives the sequential performance doesn’t always translate to great performance in all situations and we saw that in some of the IOPS tests, especially write IOPS it struggled and would fall into the middle of the pack or in a few cases down at the bottom of the charts. There were issues with write performance when the queue depths were cranked up. Those two issues together also hurt the real-world performance when it came to small files.