Lexar 8TB NM790 Internal NVMe SSD, 7000/6200 MB/s, M.2 2280, PCIe Gen 4x4

Snagged one of these pre Black Friday for CAD$668. That's a decent price: earlier this fall I got the 4TB version for CAD$275. Both of those sticks are now in my UGreen NXP4800 NAS box, running Kubuntu 24.04. I've given them a solid workout now, with several TB of data in/out, and both Lexar NVMe sticks have performed very well. Fast, no sign of any slowdowns under load, and they run cool. The 8TB is in the 45-47C range, and the 4TB at 30-33C, very safe temperatures. Anything below 70C is fine, really, and these don't even get close. A great deal at the sale price, not so good at the "normal" $900+ numbers.

It suffers a similar problem to other lower value M.2 SSDs and the old Samsung 980 - it performs very well until the cache buffer fills up, then the data transfer rate throttles right down. I use this drive for video files (so large files that want contiguous blocks of memory. Initially, it starts off transferring at about 2200 Mbps (Using blackmagic speed test), but for a sustained 5 minute test, the speed throttles right down to more like 800Mbps, and this is very likely to the cache/buffer filling up. You are better off getting the WD Black SN850 or the newer generation.

I bought this drive to place in my Thunderbolt 5 dock and use as storage for all the samples I use in music production. Installation was easy and my Mac recognized the drive and formatted it to APFS with no problems. Blackmagic speed test results for Thunderbolt 4 connection are 2183.6 MB/s write and 3110.8 MB/s read. As long as you're not editing H.265 12K video in real-time, this drive is fast enough to use as an external work drive on an M4 Mac Mini for video editing.

Fast and easy to install. Only negative is it is very expensive.

I don't generally write reviews, but my experience was weird enough that I felt the need to mention it. After plugging in this 8TB drive I realized that it already contained data - basically what looked like an existing installation of windows on it. That definitely shouldn't be the case with a brand new drive. Additionally the drive only showed up as having 500GB of storage on it. Seemed like this drive had been used previously and wasn't properly reconfigured or something. It's making me wonder if Lexar is repackaging used drives and selling them as new ones. With the price that I'm paying I should expect to receive a brand new NVMe drive, not a used or even refurbished one. Maybe this was a one off issue, but a the very least I felt inclined to mention it and bring it to light if it's a common experience.