The Lexar brand has been around for some time, and in fact, our first mention of Lexar goes all the way back to one of our first Storage Visions meetings in Las Vegas some 14 years ago.  Lexar was originally a Micron brand but was acquired by Longsys Electronics in 2017 and Longsys has built on that brand name since, bringing us to our Lexar Professional NM1080 Pro Gen5 SSD report today.  They remain to be a storage company primarily, bringing with them a strong reputation and following for enthusiast and media professional storage.

The black and gold branding of Lexar Professional products has been around for some time and this colour scheme has been very successful for Lexar, ensuring instant recognition, regardless whether it be SSD, CFExpress, SD or other memory product.

The Lexar Professional NM1090 Pro is a PCIe 5.0 (Gen5) x4 (4-lane) form factor 2280 (22mm wide x 80 mm long) SSD that utilizes the latest NVMe 2.0 SSD protocol.  This SSD is available in 1, 2, and 4TB capacities and specifications list performance at 14GB/s read with 13GB/s write for the 2/4GB capacities which drops just a bit to 14GB/s read and 10GB/s write for the 1TB version.  Similarly listed IOPS may reach  as high as 2.1 million.

The black and gold branding sticker on the NM1090 Pro is of a thick graphene manufacture for better heat dissipation and the silver SMI SM2508 8-channel NVMe SSD controller can be fouund under that with two pieces of Longsys branded memory and a Foresee branded buffer cache memory chip.  The  Silicon Motion SM2508 controller is unquestionably one of the best in the industry at this point, having reached top Gen5 performance while being able to bring down SSD temps as a result of its 6nm TSMC footprint.

The memory may be branded Longsys but it is Micron’s 232-layer 3D TLC B58r Fortis Flash NAND flash memory.  Most unlike the other SSDs we have reviewed with the SM2508 recently that are a single-sided SSD solution, Lexar has chosen to go with two 512GB RAW value NAND chips on either side of this SSD PCB (printed circuit board).

We were a bit concerned at first that the two and two placement of the memory chips on either side might create a heat increase in use, however, this wasn’t the case whatsoever.  With respect to the memory, Micron’s B58r  memory has been out for some time and is an excellent choice.  We would like to have seen Lexar utilize the 1TB versions of each chip, however, making this two-chip total single-sided SSD, as was the case with our recent Predator 2TB SSD Review which also used the SM2508 controller and DRAM cache.

The Lexar Professional NM1090 Pro comes with a five-year limited warranty, is rated for 700TBW (terabytes written) per terabyte of capacity, and supports MS DirectStorage.  Checking Amazon, the NM1090 Pro is up to 23% off at the time of this report with the 1TB coming in at $139.49, 2TB at $224.49 and 4TB at $494.99.

Let’s check out the speed…