This 4TB Lexar NM790 PCIe 4.0 SSD is down to £170.97 with an Ebay 10% off code
Our best cheap PCIe 4.0 SSD!
Lexar has been making flash storage since 1996 - in fact, their 'JumpDrive' USB sticks were synonymous with the format for a decade or more - but over the past few years they've switched to producing high-end NVMe SSDs, including our current best cheap PCIe 4.0 SSD pick: the Lexar NM790.
Today you can pick up the massive 4TB size of this high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD for just £170.97, a nice discount from the next-best price (Amazon, £187) and a sizeable departure from its original UK RRP (£199) by using code TECHDEAL10 at the checkout.
This drive is one that we've recommended quite a few times in the past, so let's let hardware big egg James do the honours this time around. He calls the NM790 "indeed affordable", while praising it for "delivering performance close to that of high-end PCIe 4.0 models like the WD Black SN850X". That's our top PCIe 4.0 pick overall, and for context it costs a mighty £310 in its 4TB incarnation!
The NM790 is rated for sequential speeds of 7400MB/s and 6900MB/s for reads and writes respectively, while random I/O performance is also impressive at 1.0M IOPS reads and 0.9M IOPS writes. That's among the very fastest speeds we've seen in this category, only really coming behind the very best drives like the aforementioned SN 850x or Samsung's 990 Pro.
The difference between the NM790 and those drives is quite minor - both use TLC NAND memory with modern PCIe 4.0 controllers, but the WD and Samsung drives use DDR4 DRAM as a chance, while the NM790 relies on the host computer's memory instead (a technology called HMB). This makes sustained performance better on those DRAM-equipped drives, but for regular everyday use you're unlikely to find any performance deficit by going with this drive - even if you use it as your primary OS or game storage drive. The only real thing I'd recommend a DRAM-equipped drive for is sustained write scenarios, eg capturing 4K 60fps video footage continuously.
Overall then, the NM790 is an awesome value in this size and capacity, and I'm actually quite tempted to pick one up given that I paid more than this for a 4TB SATA drive just a year or so ago. Still, with Amazon Prime Day 2: Electric Boogaloo on the Horizon, perhaps it's better to wait to see if even crazier deals are unfurled..?