At the moment, we’re trying on the Lexar PLAY 1TB NVMe SSD. This little drive differentiates itself from a lot of the gang by being M.2 2230 sized fairly than M.2 2280. In case you have no idea, the 30 and 80 within the sizes seek advice from the size of the drive in mm, so a 2230 drive is lower than half the size of a 2280 drive. In consequence, this drive is tiny. Lexar markets this drive as PLAY, and the first marketplace for this drive can be gadgets just like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. Personally, I’ll most likely slap this drive in a USB enclosure, however maybe I get forward of myself. First, we should always have a look at the drive.
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Lexar PLAY 1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD
The Lexar PLAY 1TB is available in a really small single-sided M.2 2230 (30mm) kind issue.
Onboard, the drive comes geared up with a Silicon Movement SM2269XT controller. Now we have seen this controller earlier than within the Solidigm P41 Plus, and on the time, I got here away with blended emotions about that drive’s efficiency. The P41 Plus was paired with QLC NAND, whereas the PLAY sports activities Micron-branded TLC, so I count on higher efficiency out of the PLAY. With that stated, the SM2269XT is designed for DRAM-less drives, and certainly the PLAY has no DRAM cache.
The bottom of the Lexar PLAY 1TB a product label.
Lexar PLAY 1TB SSD Specs
The Lexar PLAY is just obtainable at 1TB capability.
5200 MB/s learn and 4700 MB/s sequential write speeds usually are not top-end so far as a Gen 4 drive goes, however they’re firmly above something a Gen 3 drive might hope to attain. Given the shape issue, not concentrating on 7 GB/s makes some sense. The rated endurance is 600 TBW, which is completely in line for a 1TB drive and needs to be greater than sufficient given the meant marketplace for this drive. Lastly, rounding out the specs is the trade normal 5-year guarantee. If this had been a 2280 sized drive, none of this could stand out in any approach, however the 2230 kind issue has considerably fewer competing drives.
CrystalDiskInfo can provide us some primary details about the SSD and confirms we’re working at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds utilizing NVMe 1.4.
Check System Configuration
We’re utilizing the next configuration for this check:
- Motherboard: MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR5-6000 UDIMMs
Our testing makes use of the Lexar PLAY 1TB because the boot drive for the system, put in within the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. This slot helps as much as PCIe Gen 5 x4. The drive is stuffed to 85% capability with knowledge, after which some is deleted, leaving round 60% used area on the quantity. Particular word: the M.2_1 slot on this board doesn’t natively assist 2230-sized drives, so I simply rigged it into place. It doesn’t have an effect on my testing, nevertheless it was price noting.
Subsequent, we’re going to get into our efficiency testing.
