Lexar Professional NM1090 PRO review

Transfer Performance

Tom’s Hardware measured over 12.5GB/s for roughly the first 65 seconds of its sustained-write test on the 4TB drive. Later phases were slower, with steady-state writes near 2.4GB/s. A single project that fits into the fast phase and a day spent rewriting the whole disk are different buying cases. There also needs to be another drive or application that can deliver the data quickly enough. ¹

Installation & Cooling

Tom’s Hardware found components on both sides of its 4TB sample. ² During sustained writes, the lab recorded peak sensor readings of 81°C, 74°C and 78°C. It used the 74°C reading to estimate how close the drive was to throttling. ¹ Check clearance in a thin laptop and the motherboard’s heatsink arrangement in a desktop. Temperature depends on airflow and the workload, so a result from a test bench can’t predict the temperature in a closed notebook.

Lexar lists the 8TB model (LNM109P008T-RNNNU) at up to 14,400MB/s for sequential reads and 13,400MB/s for writes. ³ The 4TB test does not establish its sustained speed.

Capacity & Endurance

Lexar rates the 4 TB drive for 2,800 TB of writes. That is a more useful number for a video scratch disk than the peak read speed, particularly if you know how much footage the workstation ingests each week. The 1 TB model has both a lower 700 TBW limit and a lower peak sequential write rating of 10,000 MB/s. Although it carries the same family name, it gives up speed as well as space compared with 2 TB and 4 TB. ^{2 3}

Console Compatibility

Tom’s Hardware also tested the 4 TB NM1090 PRO on a PlayStation 5, moving more than 192 GB between the console’s internal storage and the expansion drive. The console runs the expansion slot at PCIe 4.0, so the Gen 5 rating you pay for on a desktop offers little extra here. Sony requires a suitable cooling structure within its specified slot dimensions. For the bare, double-sided 4 TB model, that means checking the combined height above and below the board. ^{1 2}

Alternatives

For a game library, a roomy PCIe 4.0 drive may give you a more noticeable improvement by letting you keep more titles installed. A Gen 5 interface won’t make the GPU draw more frames. If paid work involves moving many large files between internal drives, time a typical copy on your current setup and check which end is limiting it.

Verdict

The 4TB NM1090 PRO is a persuasive high-speed secondary drive for a suitably cooled desktop. Buy it when your real transfers can exploit it, and compare post-cache behavior if your jobs routinely run long.