Lexar NM610 buying guide: find out if this is the right SSD for your needs

Finding the best SSDs has become a full time project for us because, ultimately, a solid state drive (SSD) is the quickest and easiest way to turn your ageing PC into a beast. Forget RAM, CPU, and GPU, the right SSD can work wonders. Today, we're looking at the Lexar NM610 SSD.

• What is an SSD? Confusing jargon and technical terms explained
• How to choose the right SSD for you, whatever your budget

Unlike standard hard drives, which have a spinning platter and needle, SSDs are made up of a piece of flash memory and no moving parts. This basically means that data can be retrieved (and written) a lot faster, like 100x faster at least, which has the effect of making your entire PC seem newer and better.

There are a lot of different SSDs on the market right now and Lexar's NM610 SSD is an attractive candidate for most people, offering a good balance of high-end specs with a mid-range price. 

So, should you buy the Lexar NM610? 

Lexar NM610 SSD: Specifications

Like most cutting-edge SSDs in 2021, the Lexar NM610 uses PCIe NVMe 1.3 to connect to the rest of your computer. These terms are bit confusing, but relate to how fast data can be transferred between the SSD and everything else; in many older machines and SSDs, there was a SATA bottleneck that limited performance.

Not so for the NM610: These improvements mean that data can be transferred at up to 2,100MB/s read and 1,600MB/s write, both of which are stunningly fast and will easily beat older SSDs and spinning hard drives. As we said, the SSD is so fundamental to your PC that these speeds will have a huge immediate impact.

Elsewhere, Lexar says the NM610 is shock and vibration resistent, making it ideal for the clumsy among us – and anyone who wants to be sure that knocks and bangs won't damage any data.

The NM610 comes in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB configurations.

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Lexar NM610 SSD: Durability

We already mentioned that the Lexar NM610 is shock and vibration proof but SSD endurance is measured in a few ways. The most popular (and universal) is Terabytes Written (TBW), a measure of how many times the SSD can be totally rewritten before it starts to slow down. 

SSDs usually increase their TBW durability the larger the storage capacity, so keep that in mind when choosing which version to buy. 

The 250GB version is rated as 125TBW, the 500GB version is 250TBW, and the 1TB version is 500TBW. To make it clear: the 1TB model can be totally rewritten 500 times before it starts to slow down. All of these are very respectable and will last most users a long, long time. 

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Lexar NM610 SSD: So, should I buy it? 

Absolutely! We would recommend the Lexar NM610 to anyone that needs high performance from their PC and doesn't mind cracking open the case to switch out components.

The Lexar NM610 is a really good mid-range SSD that's not too expensive but doesn't scrimp on having top-end features and incredible read/write speeds. If you're looking to upgrade your computer quickly and simply, buying an SSD is the best place to start: everything else benefits from it.

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