NM700 arrives in a small packet which shows a depiction of the drive with accompanying information surrounding the capacity, form factor and expected transfer rates. Aside from a warranty leaflet, the SSD is scarce of bundled accessories. However, our small M.2 drive does sit within a plastic case to ensure no damage occurs during the delivery process.


NM700 conforms to the M.2 form factor and more specifically the 2280 size. Aesthetics are still an important factor on such a dainty product as an M.2 SSD and since this drive may well be on full display for users with a side panel on their chassis, it’s great to see an attractive design which is likely to coordinate well with the rest of the system. As you’ll have seen on the first page of this review, the NM700 blends in very well with the styling on our MSI Z490 UNIFY motherboard.

Lexar’s NM700 is based on the Marvell 88SS1092 NVMe controller which offers eight-channels and is a triple-core variant (ARM Cortex R5). This drive also uses twin 16nm TLC 3D NAND.

Since NM700 utilises PCI Express Gen 3 x4, we expect strong sequential read/write performance from our drive – using the Marvell controller enables speeds of over 3GB/s.