Intro
Lexar’s NQ100 is built to rejuvenate Laptops and desktops still stuck on spinning hard drives. Solid-state storage is the easiest and fastest way to breathe new life into older machines with reduced boot times, faster load times, snappy file transfers, and even longer battery life on mobile machines. Hard drives had a great run, and still some purpose in deep storage for enterprise users, but it’s time to retire them at home, in the office, and even on the road with Lexar’s NQ100.
PC Test Bench would like to thank Lexar for providing us with a sample of the NQ100 to check out.
Lexar’s take on the NQ100 Drive:
– Improve your system’s performance with the Lexar NQ100 2.5” SATA III (6Gb/s) SSD. This easy upgrade gives you faster boot-ups, application load times, and data transfers, with read speeds of up to 550MB/s. It is also cooler, quieter, and more energy-efficient than a traditional hard disk drive.
About Lexar:
Lexar was split off from Cirrus Logic in 1996 in San Jose, California, and manufactured flash storage products including SD and CF memory cards, USB flash drives, and Solid-State Drives. Lexar was later acquired by Micron in 2006 and continued on until 2017 until parent company Micron announced it would discontinue its retail removable media storage business and put it up for sale. Lexar branding and trademark rights were purchased by China-based memory company Longsys.
FEATURES
- Upgrade your computer for faster startups, data transfers, and application loads.
- Fast performance, easy upgrade.
- Shock and vibration resistant with no moving parts.
- Three-year limited warranty
SPECIFICATIONS
- Capacity – 240GB, 480GB, 960GB
- Form Factor – 2.5”, 7mm thickness
- Interface – SATA-III 6Gbps
- Speed – Sequential read up to 550MB/s
- NAND flash – 3D TLC
- Operating Temperature – 0° C to 70° C (32°F to 158°F)
- Storage Temperature – -40° C to 85° C (-40°F to 185°F)
- Shock Resistant – 1500G, duration 0.5ms, Half Sine Wave
- TBW
- 240GB – 84TB
- 480GB – 168TB
- 960GB – 336TB
- DWPD – 0.32
- Dimension (L x W x H) – 69.85 mm x 100.2 mm x 7 mm / 2.75” x 3.94” x 0.28”
- Weight – 34g
A Closer Look
Lexar’s NQ100 comes in a blue box with a full-color picture on the front. The capacity is indicated with a sticker on the bottom edge.
The rear of the box has a blurb about the drive in several languages and shows the drive model number and serial number through a window.
Inside, the drive is nestled in a plastic tray with a folded manual under it.
The drive itself is a nice dark grey with blue accents and a white Lexar logo in the center. If you have a case that shows off 2.5” drives, this one will look pretty nice.
A label covers most of the back with the model, capacity, specs, and serial number.
The business end looks like any other SATA drive, nothing new to see here. The case is all plastic sans the threaded inserts for mounting.
The plastic case just snaps together and after removing two warranty stickers, the drive is quite easy to pop open with a spudger or similar tool. Inside there is… not much really. The actual PCB is quite small, barely bigger than the SATA connections.
Lexar uses a custom branded DM928 controller which operates without a DRAM buffer. Two 128GB Micron NAND flash chips comprise the storage pool, one on the front with an empty pad next to it.
Two more pads are on the underside of the PCB with one occupied with the second NAND flash chip.
Testing
Test Platform:
CPU Intel Core i9-10900k
Mobo Asus ROG Strix Z490-I Gaming
RAM 16GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200MHz
GPU Nvidia RTX 2080 FE
OS SSD Samsung 960 Pro 2TB
CrystalDiskInfo
Our drive connects at SATA-III 6 Gbps speeds and supports Native Command Queuing (NCA) as well as TRIM commands to keep performance levels high over prolonged use. We started out at 30C and only warmed up a couple of degrees during testing, so thermals will not be something you need to worry about.
CrystalDiskMark 7.0
“CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows measuring sequential and random read/write speeds.”
The default setting in CrystalDiskMark tests high queue depth sequential transfers, which look amazing on modern PCIe-based drives, but it doesn’t show the real picture. These Speeds look great and are not far from maxing out the SATA bus connection.
For comparison, here is an older 120GB hard drive test we found on a now-closed eBay listing, something you might find in any older laptop or desktop. The Sequential speeds boxed in red compared to the first row of our test, you can see the mechanical drive is around 8x slower. Sequential reads and writes will be something like copying files or maybe loading a game.
Random Queue depth 1 reads and writes (boxed in blue and the second row on our chart) aren’t even on the same playing field. This is going to be your daily use, your boot-ups, your spreadsheets, most gaming and online banking type of use. We see more than a 16,000% speed increase. Several orders of magnitude. THIS is what you will feel upgrading and it really does change the entire feel of a computer.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
Atto shows the NQ100 doing 4K transfers at around 330MB/s for writes and 218MB/s for reads with full speed being achieved at the 128KB size and above. Speeds are flat-lined over most of the testing range which is a good sign.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
Performance is about on par with the rest of our testing. Low latencies help land a surprisingly good score of almost 4700 points.
Black Magic Disk Speed Test
Disk Speed Test is an easy-to-use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high-quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. Disk Speed Test will continue to test writes and reads from your disk so you can evaluate both performance and readability over time.
Video editing is extremely demanding on a storage drive but Lexar’s NQ100 can handle most things with ease, not something you can generally say about the old ‘spinning rust’ this is intended to replace.
Final Thoughts & Conclusion
If you have a machine still booting from a hard drive, you owe it to yourself to stop the pain and upgrade to solid-state. With Lexar’s NQ100 going up to 960GB, you might even enjoy a nice capacity increase as well. You might see PCIe-based drives advertising speeds of GB’s per second and wonder why you should bother with SATA but the truth is, those numbers are misleading for the overwhelming majority of day-to-day use cases. Gaming, Office work, browsing the web, and almost anything else that typical users do daily will be about the same experience on the NQ100 as it would be a very expensive premium NVMe drive. Solid State Drives are so fast that you just can’t queue up multiple commands in the milliseconds it takes to read or write a file.
I will tell you that nothing makes as profound of a difference in daily experience as moving from a mechanical drive to a solid state. I promise you, if you haven’t made the jump yet, you are missing out on something and will never willingly go back to mechanical for boot drives. Those noisy clunkers are great for storing mountains of pictures and video, or those games you don’t play often, but not for daily use. If you still boot from one, do yourself a favor and grab your own NQ100 drive. This 240GB model can be had for around $32 with the 480GB model in the wild for about $52 and the massive 960GB model coming in at around $88 on the street.
Rating 8/10
More Lexar Products we have reviewed
[taq_review]
