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Sometimes things almost seem just too coincidental. Less than two weeks back we received the Lexar NM620 NVMe SSD for review while only a few days after that the Lexar name came up while touching base with an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in some time. We were discussing his business, which is PC build and repair, when he suddenly mentioned Lexar and stated that Lexar had become his go-to for SSDs for some time now. I asked him why. he responded price and performance. With that he asked if I had any old SSDs laying around that I could toss his way and I had to laugh. He already knew that answer.
Today we are reporting on Lexar’sa newest release, the PCIe 3.0 NM620. We are actually pretty interested in the report as it has a new PCIe controller by a company named Innogrit that we haven’t reviewed prior…at least in PCIe 3.0. If you look back at our XPG Gammix S70 PCIe 4.0 report. you may note that its controller was also Innogrit, and what an impression it made.
The Lexar NM620 is just now being distributed to retailers and is available in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities. It is an M.2 SSD of the 2280 form factor (80mm) and relies on PCIe 3.0 with NVMe 4.0 protocol. It is a DRAM-less SSD which means we can pretty much guarantee performance is variable with different capacities. The 256GB has 3000MB/s read/1300MB/s write speeds, 512GB has 3300MBs/2400MB/s and the 1TB version achieves 3300MB/s read and 3000MB/s write. As well TBW is 125, 250 and 500TBW respectively with a five year warranty.
The NM620 is built on the Lexar branded Innogrit IG5216 PCIe 3.0 NVMe controller, this shown on the far right of the PCB in the above picture. One might notice that it is considerably smaller than what we might typically see in a Gen3 SSD controller.
The Lexar NM620 is also a single-sided SSD where we find all four NAND packages on one side. This again goes against the norm and is the first time we have seen this, as all others choose to follow the two and two pattern on both sides.
Plainly obvious is the fact that we don’t see any DRAM buffer chips on either side of the NM620. Pricing for a new release is as expected and we found Amazon to have availability of the 512GB we are reviewing today at $89.99 and the 1TB at $159.99. It’s competition of course is also a new release, this being the Samsung 980 which is also a DRAM-less SSD and hits a fairly low price point.