I've been scouring the web to update our cheap SSD deals guide and it's not pretty out there. Most SSDs that we recommend have been gradually increasing in price over the past few months, and their new 'sale' prices are a shadow of their former genuinely excellent ones.
This sort of seasonal price bump is somewhat expected: the Black Friday and holiday deals last year were when SSDs were at their absolute lowest we've ever seen them, and that was unlikely to last into 2024. Similarly, there's the added threat of more general NAND chip price increases, but it's tough to say the exact cause for the generally higher prices I'm finding right now.
Thankfully there are still some decent deals around. This Lexar NM790 2TB being one of them, at $120. That's still more than it has been discounted during sales events such as Prime Day and Black Friday, but we'll have to take what we can get right now, and there's no other deal out there on a high-performance PCIe 4.0 drive worth talking about.
The NM790 is an SSD I reviewed myself last year, and I was seriously impressed with the performance out of this drive. I was dealing with the 4TB version for my Lexar NM790 review but the 2TB looks just as good: 7400 MB/s read speeds and 6500 MB/s write speeds to keep any game fed and file transfers speedy. I found the 4TB drive got pretty darn close to those manufacturer rated numbers in benchmarking, too.
The Lexar NM790 is a DRAM-less drive. That means there's no DRAM chip on the SSD to help cache files at speed for dealing with later. That's okay, though, as in my testing I found the SLC cache mode was sufficient to make for very speedy real-world performance figures.
Unfortunately both the 4TB and 1TB drives are a bit more unattainable right now. One is over $300 and the other is out of stock everywhere I looked. But for a ray of sunshine in an otherwise pricey SSD market right now, the 2TB Lexar NM790 will do just fine.
