Our 'best cheap PCIe 4.0 SSD' pick is now £85 for 2TB at Amazon UK

rockpapershotgun.com:

Lexar's NM790 PCIe 4.0 SSD is our 'best cheap PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming' pick, offering extremely rapid speeds. It maxes out at 7400MB/s reads and 6500MB/s writes, near the boundary of the PCIe 4.0 standard, and random read/write figures are impressive too despite lacking a DRAM cache, using HMB instead. So I thought it worth mentioning that you can now pick up this 2TB high-end drive for £85, following a price drop from £93 at Amazon UK.

So those read/write figures - the top PCIe 4.0 drives like the Samsung 990 Pro and WD SN850x are able to top 1M IOPS, and the NM790 comes darn close with a 1M IOPS read rating and a 0.9M IOPS write rating - impressive stuff, even if it's a shade below the very top options.

Here's what hardware maven James had to say about the 790 after testing it:

I'm actually currently testing the larger 4TB model for Eurogamer, and the drive recorded some impressive speeds in both synthetic and real-world testing. In fact, I also named the NM790 one of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs over at Eurogamer, so you're getting a double-rated SSD at a great price.

Finally, I thought I'd touch on Lexar's corporate history as it's a brand I was familiar with but has come into new prominence recently. So, according to Wikipedia, after being spun off from Californian semiconductor firm Cirrus Logic in 1996, the company was acquired by Micron (who own the Crucial brand) in 2006. Eleven years later, Lexar's brand was sold to Longsys, another flash memory company based in China. They've since been active in the flash memory market, producing the first 1TB SD card, a prototype 7500MB/s SSD in 2019 and, most recently, DRAM modules. So - it's been an interesting ride there, but Lexar continues to do good stuff even if it's now