Lexar decides to expand its success NM790 The second hard drive has an aesthetic more suited to the PS5, and the capacity range can be expanded to up to 8TB. Play isn’t charting a new course with the NM790, but it does mean it’s a great drive for consoles or gaming PCs that need a lot of storage capacity. The only real sticking points are current pricing and 8TB availability, as the drive has to compete with similar products WD black SN850X. This brings challenges to the game.
While its hardware isn’t new, using the same Maxio MAP1602 controller and YMTC 232-layer TLC NAND as the NM790, the Play still hits the right mark with relatively solid all-around performance and high power efficiency. As with the NM790, 4TB is a solid choice when properly marketed as a budget drive. Although prices fluctuate, they may sometimes exceed the actual price 4TB Samsung 990 Pro. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case, but it’s still $10 to $15 more expensive than essentially the same drive. Lexus NM790 4TB.
It’s impossible to find an 8TB SKU yet, but Lexar will have a hard time undercutting the SN850X with that capacity. Still, you should keep Play in mind when buying a high-capacity hard drive, especially for the PS5. Just keep an eye on the prices and look for good sales.
| product | 2TB | 4TB | 8TB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $144.97 ($229.99) | $337.41 ($379.99) | $949.99 |
| Overall dimensions | M.2 2280 stainless steel | M.2 2280 stainless steel | M.2 2280DS |
| Interface/Protocol | PCIe 4.0×4/NVMe 2.0 | PCIe 4.0×4/NVMe 2.0 | PCIe 4.0×4/NVMe 2.0 |
| controller | China Unicom MAP1602 | China Unicom MAP1602 | China Unicom MAP1602 |
| dynamic random access memory | Not applicable (HMB) | Not applicable (HMB) | Not applicable (HMB) |
| flash memory | Yangtze River Storage 232-layer TLC | Yangtze River Storage 232-layer TLC | Yangtze River Storage 232-layer TLC |
| sequential reading | 7,400MB/sec | 7,400MB/sec | 7,400MB/sec |
| sequential write | 6,500MB/sec | 6,500MB/sec | 6,500MB/sec |
| random read | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
| random write | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
| Safety | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
| aspect | standard | standard | standard |
| Endurance (TBW) | 1,600TB | 3,200TB | 6,400TB |
| Part number | LNMPLY8002T-RNNNU | LNMPLY8004T-RNNNU | LNMPLY8008T-RNNNU |
| Warranty | 5 years | 5 years | 5 years |
Lexar isn’t going for smaller capacities on the Play. The drive is only available in 2TB and larger capacities, including the 4TB model we received for review and a future 8TB SKU. We sampled the 4TB today, and will introduce the 8TB in detail below. The Play’s sequential read and write speeds can reach up to 7,400 / 6,500 MB/s, and random read and write IOPS are not stated, but we know that the hardware can reach up to about 1,000K IOPS each. In other words, it offers plenty of performance.
The drive is backed by a five-year, 800TB write warranty per terabyte of capacity. That’s more than enough, more than the standard 600TB. Pricing is already well below the posted MSRP, and rightfully so. at the moment, 2TB for $149 and 4TB for $254 — instead of $229 and $379 respectively. It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s still higher than the competition, including the Lexar NM790 and $204 Silicon Energy US75 Use the same core hardware.
The 8TB is still MIA, but has an MSRP of $949. Considering the excellence, this will never be for sale 8TB Western Digital Black SN850X yes Bare metal costs $649or $679 with radiatorwe have seen it fall below $600.
Lexar Play software and accessories
Lexar offers three SSD downloads on its website: Lexar DiskMaster, Lexar DataShield, and Lexar Recovery Tool. Lexar DiskMaster is your standard SSD toolbox for accessing system and drive information, drive health, performance testing, firmware upgrades, secure erase, and more. Lexar DataShield is encryption software for protecting your files. Finally, Lexar recovery tool can help you recover data from the drive. Unfortunately, this last tool may not be very useful for SSDs unless you use it right away, as SSDs quickly trim and then erase data, but have poor recoverability.
Lexar Play: A closer look
The Lexar Play comes with a beautiful heatsink that’s compatible with the PS5 and is powerful enough to cool the drive. On the back, we see that the driver is rated to pull up to about 7W — 3.3V/2A, with some voltage tolerance — but with SMART power state, it’s rated to max out at 6W. In fact, it will pull even less. This drive should not overheat or throttle.
You might think this is a Lexar NM790 in disguise. Same brand, same hardware, what’s the difference? You can even buy the NM790 with a heatsink, so it more or less serves the same purpose. Honestly, it seems like Lexar is just positioning the Play as gaming, while the NM790 is more general. There aren’t many differences between them other than appearance, but that’s not a bad thing as the NM790 is a very solid drive.
The heatsink is not too difficult to remove, so the drive can be used in a laptop. By default, the heatsink has thermal pads on both sides of the drive. This helps prevent the drive from contacting the base of the metal heat sink. The top thermal pad is wide and should conduct heat effectively, although it must go through the label. Usually this doesn’t affect the cooling effect much.
The first thing we noticed is that the drive is single-sided. The controller is a Maxio MAP1602, specifically the F3C U variant. This version of the controller complies with the NVMe 2.0 rather than 1.4 standard and is designed to handle up to 4TB of flash memory.
Speaking of flash memory, it is renamed YMTC 232 layer TLC as we have seen in many drives such as Lexar NM790. This controller and flash memory combination is popular among budget drives and offers decent performance. What’s especially nice is that these drives are available in single-sided form at 4TB capacity at a reasonable price.
Phison’s E27T controller is usually used with Kioxia 162-layer BiCS6 TLC flash memory, such as Corsair MP600 Elite Like several other drives, it’s a direct competitor, but so far it’s really only available in capacities up to 2TB. But let’s get back to the part about 4TB flash memory.
This drive is listed as an 8TB SKU. How is this achieved? Some drives in this category, such as Team MP44used a different 8TB controller in the past, namely the Phison E18. This controller has twice as many channels as DRAM and is double-sided. Generally speaking, it’s difficult to drive 8TB with a four-channel controller like Play’s MAP1602, because even with specialized variants, it can only handle up to 8 dies per channel.
Given the ubiquity of 1Tb wafers, the theoretical upper limit is 4TB. However, two or even four dies can be assigned to each die signal, allowing 64 dies to be addressed for up to 8TB of flash memory. We haven’t seen this in person yet, and our Play sample was only 4TB. However, the 8TB Play (and possibly the 8TB MP44, etc.) seems to have achieved this goal.
So the next set of questions is: Can this be done with just four NAND flash memory packages? Yes and no respectively. Each package can stack 16 dies at 2TB each, so you only need four packages. However, driving so much flash memory with this controller can be challenging. If you have read our Crucial T500 4TB Reviewyou’ll remember that this may require additional ICs—especially DDR multiplexers for load isolation. Essentially, this allows multiple dies (e.g. two different memories) to share a channel without increasing load, since the memory being accessed can be switched while the other bank remains isolated.
The real world effect is that you can manage to get 8TB of capacity using this controller without signal integrity issues, but the downside is the extra cost and PCB space required for the IC. Considering how compact these drives are without the IC (just look at our photo of the exposed 4TB Play), the introduction of the IC means moving the two NAND packages to the opposite side of the drive.
One potential optimization is to place the IC only on top, with the flash memory packages mirroring each other on each side of the PCB. This is accomplished by placing the MAP1602 controller in the middle of the drive rather than at the edge. Unfortunately, we don’t have an 8TB Play to refer to, but the heatsink design could accommodate this. However, we expect the 8TB to be slightly less efficient.
Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see what the 8TB might offer, and how much it will retail for. But now let’s experience the 4TB Play first.
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