Final Thoughts
While we are always looking for the fastest drive out there when it comes to storage, in most scenarios you’ll end up picking up one of these drives for say an OS or game drive and you’ll outfit the rest of your system with more budget friendly drives. Now that new motherboards have multiple high-speed M.2 slots these budget drives do not have to be SATA-based drives. That is where a drive like the NM710 comes in.
This drive is budget orientated so as you saw in our testing it is not going to break any speed records. The advertised speeds for this drive is 5000 MB/s read and 4500 MB/s write and we saw speeds very close to that. This is obviously so much faster than a SATA-based drive and still would be perfect for something like a game drive. The drive sat under one of the M.2 heatsinks on our motherboard so we did not run into any type of heat issues or anything like that either.
Without an on-board cache chip you may think that write performance would drop off immediately, but by using a host memory buffer we were able to write up to about 34% of the drive without taking a performance hit. This well exceeds any type of real-world scenario.
Right now you can pick the 1TB version of the drive up at our favorite online retailer for $71.30. Which I do feel is a bit high for this drive as you can get a 1TB WD_BLACK SN850X for only a few dollars more and and even Lexar’s own NM800 PRO 1TB is cheaper. Not sure if this is a weird Amazon pricing error, but I can’t really recommend picking this drive over either of those. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Lexar NM710 Gen4 Solid State Drive a 7 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Good overall performance
– Available up to 2TB
Cons:
– Pricing seems very much off compared to other drives
– 500GB version has much slower write speeds
