Nextorage X Series (NN5PRO) 2TB review
What are you after in your next SSD upgrade? If speed is your primary desire, you will find plenty of it with the Nextorage X Series. This PCIe Gen5 compatible 2TB SSD easily crunches through files at upwards of 12 GB/s—excellent for a high-end workstation with plenty of lanes to spare. However, Gen5 drives still face a significant hurdle before mass adoption in gaming PCs: they're expensive and there's little benefit today to the faster speeds they offer.
The Nextorage X Series is right up there with some of the more performant Gen5 SSDs going, such as the Crucial T700. It's faster than the Seagate FireCuda 540 we reviewed last year, too, though it shares similarities to both drives: the Nextorage uses the same Phison E26 controller and Micron 232-layer TLC NAND.
The X Series 2TB SSD is rated to 12,400 MB/s sequential read and 11,800 MB/s sequential write. It gets pretty close to those figures in my own testing within CrystalDiskMark, reaching 12,348 MB/s read and 11,679 MB/s write. That's about as on the money as I'd like for any drive.
Those are burst speeds, however, and over longer jobs you'll see some significant drop off, namely once the pseudo-SLC write cache has been expunged and the drive falls back on the NAND's native TLC performance. Our sustained write test within IOMeter gives a good indication of when you can expect that to happen: after around 322GB of data has been written to the drive in a single sustained job. That's around 16% of the drive's total 2TB capacity.
Capacity: 2TB/1TB
Interface: PCIe Gen5 (NVMe)
Size: 2230
NAND: Micron232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash
Controller: Phison E26 controller
DRAM: 4GB DDR4 SDRAM
Seq read (rated): 12,400 MB/s
Seq write (rated): 11,800 MB/s
Endurance: 1,400 TBW
Warranty: Five-year
Price: $400
The native TLC performance isn't dreadful, either. Even after the cache is saturated, write speeds stuck around the 3,600 MB/s mark for over four minutes. By that point, the drive has shifted a lot of data. After that it
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