Lexar Professional NM800 NVMe SSD Review

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers change depending on what hardware is being tested.  These were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 31.104.2021.12

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a freeware disk benchmarking utility that can test a variety of storage solutions from single hard drives to multi level RAID arrays and solid state disks.  The tests can be broken down to transfer sizes between 512B to 64MB with lengths between 64KB and 32GB.  Testing results are shown on a transfer chart with reads and writes clearly marked.

For our benchmark the 64MB transfer is being recorded even though the 128k range is often quoted as having the fastest transfer speed (range) of any drive.

Crystal Disk Mark is a widely available disk benchmarking program that can test a variety of different scenarios from Sequential to Random with Multiple and Single queues.

For our tests the Sequential and Random test with multiple queues and threads will be recorded.

PCMark 10 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. Similar to 3DMark this new version tests the entire system as a whole using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

SYSmark 25 is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of Productivity, Creativity and Responsiveness. The new Productivity Scenario has updated workloads and applications geared towards office centric user activities. The new Creativity Scenario features updated workloads and applications geared toward media-centric user activities. The new Responsiveness Scenario models ‘pain points’ in the user experience. These common activities that include: application launches, file launches, web browsing with multiple tabs, multi-tasking, and background application installation.

These benchmark results are very interesting, not because they are vastly different but rather show have evenly matched the Lexar Processional NM800 Pro is against the Patriot Viper VP3400.  Both drives support PCI Express 4.0 and feature 7000+ MB/s transfer speeds.  The Lexar drive is faster on paper and is supported by the SiSoft Sandra Physical Disks benchmark however if we go down the line the benchmarks that favor “Random Reads/Writes” tend to favor the Patriot drive and marginally within the normal run to run variance.

Bottom line, both drives are extremely fast and yet only one comes with a beefy heatsink for use in systems beyond the simple desktop PC.