Lexar NM1090 Gen5 SSD Finally Hits Retail, Up To 12 GB/s & Dedicated Cooling Heatsink

Lexar's cutting-edge Gen5 "NM1090" SSD has finally hit shelves, featuring blazing-fast speeds & an upgraded cooling design.

It looks like Lexar's first Gen5 SSD has appeared in the markets after months of showcases and we also saw it displayed at Computex 2024. While the company isn't certainly behind competitors, a late entry is better than a flawed one, and with Lexar's NM1090 Gen5 SSD, they have managed to top things off.

Diving into specifications, Lexar's NM1090 Gen5 SSD features high-end read and write speeds of 12,000 MB/s and 11,000 MB/s, respectively. The firm says that the NM1090 offers double the performance of its previous flagship counterpart, courtesy of the uplifts brought by using the Gen5 standard

Moreover, Lexar's NM1090 Gen5 SSD employs a 4 GB onboard SLC dynamic cache and features support for Microsoft's DirectStorage, ensuring optimal performance and significantly lower latency. The firm has also utilized 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory chips with the NM1090, which complements the overall premium nature of the product & guarantees high-end overall performance.

Since cooling has become a necessity with Gen5 SSDs these days, Lexar has integrated a pretty interesting solution, which includes the use of a dedicated heatsink, similar to what competitors like Corsair offer. The heatsink features a heat-blasting fan along with thermal conductive silicone sheets as well, resulting in adequate heat dissipation and cooling performance.

Lexar's states that the onboard heatsink improves the cooling rate by up to 30%. As an add-on feature, the heatsink comes with an RGB option onboard as well, with a circular ring at the center which is controllable through respective motherboard software.

Now, moving onto configurations and pricing, Lexar's NM1090 Gen5 SSD will drop in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB flavors, with the 1TB model going for 1,599 yuan or around $220, while the 2TB variant retails for 2,699 yuan or $372. Pricing of the 4TB model isn't certain yet; neither has the NM1090 debuted at any US retailers for now. Hence, the pricing details aren't confirmed yet.