Page 10 - Conclusion
SSDs are a necessity in pretty much all electronics with storage, and even though the M.2 2230 specification has been around for a long time, good NVMe models have been challenging to find until recently. It is refreshing to see the influx of compact budget performance solid state drives hit the market recently for compatibility with ultrathin laptops as well as portable gaming devices, and the Lexar PLAY 1TB is another great example after I reviewed the WD_BLACK SN770M a few weeks back. So how did the Lexar PLAY 1TB stack up as a compact budget performance SSD? Let us start off with its performance. The Lexar PLAY 1TB's linear read and write speeds were on the slower side compared to full-size NVMe SSDs even though it met specifications, and the simulated real-life performance in PCMark and 3DMark lands it on the lower end of the PCIe 4.0 NVMe list. This is no different than the SN770M though. Medium workloads and benchmarks were acceptable, but nothing spectacular. Its IOPS performance was closer to budget mainstream drives, meaning the Lexar PLAY 1TB was quite a bit slower than the SN770M in both the medium workload and IOPS categories. I do like its native hardware encryption support, which the WD_BLACK SN770M does not have. One limitation to point out is the Lexar PLAY is only available in 1TB capacity. If you want more, you will have to buy something else. For about $110 at press time, the PLAY is exactly the same price as the SN770M 1TB. Both come with a 5-year warranty, so unless native hardware encryption support is a necessity, the WD_BLACK SN770M offers better performance than the Lexar PLAY for the same amount of money.
Lexar provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Lexar PLAY 1TB M.2 2230 NVMe SSD delivers acceptable storage performance for ultrathin laptops and portable gaming devices.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
