Final Thoughts
As I mentioned earlier in this review this is the second M.2 NVMe drive we’ve taken a look at from Lexar, the first was the NM610. The NM610 did not impress us all that much so we were hoping for better results with the NM700. We did see better results, but we also noticed some things that bothered us. First the read performance was some of the best that we’ve seen for a PCI-Express 3.0 NVMe drive. It topped the charts in both CrystalDiskMark and the PCMark 8 storage benchmark which is very impressive. We also saw solid performance in the AIDA64 read Disk Bechmark, so when it comes to read performance this drive is one of the best we’ve seen.
But then we come to read performance, which for this drive is rated at 2000 MB/s. In all of our tests we never achieved that speed, we got close, but never right up to that. Now this might have been because the drive was thermally throttling. We observed temperatures up to 89C running ATTO Disk Benchmark, which is not even a very intense benchmark, and in this test we saw write performance take a hit. The drive does not ship with a heatsink so we ran it without one. While most motherboards these days will have M.2 heatsinks for this drive, there are plenty that do not. While throttling was mainly caused by writing to the drive we did have the drive installed in an open-air test bench so we can imagine it would run even hotter in an enclosed case.
Even with the throttling and slower write speeds you are still going to see increased performance over a typical solid state drive. Lexar is also backing the NM700 with a 5-year warranty which is nice to see.
At the end of the day it really comes down to price. Unfortunately we were unable to find the NM700 in a 1TB capacity for sale on Amazon, but the 512GB version is $86.25, so we can assume the 1TB would be around $130-$160? That is just a hard sell when the Sabrent Rocket Q 1TB is $119.98 and it has better performance, the same warranty, and does not thermally throttle. With that said we give the Lexar NM700 M.2 NVMe Solid State Drive a 7 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Some of the best read performance we’ve seen
– Single-sided
– 5-year warranty
Cons:
– Price
– Poor write performance
– Thermally throttles
