Lexar NM1090 Pro PCIe 5.0 SSD

The Lexar NM1090 Pro is the company's first PCI-Express 5.0 consumer SSD. It uses the new Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, which is SMI's first Gen 5 controller for the consumer space. We've reviewed the SM2508 three times before, focusing on the 2 TB models of the Acer GM9000, Kingston Fury Renegade, and Crucial T710. This is our first look at the 4 TB version of the SM2508. The 4 TB model has additional flash chips—four instead of two, which opens up new opportunities for parallelism, so the performance numbers will be interesting, and also how it performs against the Gen 5 controllers from Phison and Samsung.

The Lexar NM1090 Pro was slightly off the pace of its rivals, but costs about the same. A good drive in the overall scheme, but on a lower rung of the PCIe 5.0/DRAM ladder.

The Lexar Professional NM1090 Pro is available in 1,2 and 4TB sizes, reached 14GB/s and 2 million IOPS, comes with a 5-year limited warranty and has great pricing.

The Lexar NM1090 Pro has blazing sequential throughput speeds, but its overall performance is lower than some of its less-expensive PCIe 5.0 SSD competitors.