Lexar's flagship NM1090 Gen5 SSD is here: up to 12GB/sec, dedicated cooling heatsink

Lexar has been showing off its new NM1090 Gen5 SSD for a while now, but the company has finally unleashed it onto retail shelves... offering 12GB/sec+ Gen5 SSD speeds, and a new upgraded cooling design.

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Inside, the Lexar NM1090 Gen5 SSD features up to 12GB/sec (12,000MB/sec) reads, and up to 11GB/sec (11,000MB/sec) writes. Lexar says that its new NM1090 offers double the performance of its previous-gen flagship SSD, thanks to the upgrades delivered by the new PCIe Gen5 standard.

Lexar is using 4GB of onboard SLC dynamic cache that supports Microsoft DirectStorage technology, ensuring optimal performance and significantly lower latency. Lexar is using 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory chips, providing that 12GB/sec+ of read speed goodness.

Cooling Gen5 SSDs isn't easy, and while some of them -- like Sabrent's industry-leading Rocket 5 Gen5 SSDs that don't need active cooling -- Lexar has used a dedicated heatsink that is similar to some of its Gen5 SSD competitors. Lexar's new heatsink features a heat-blasting fan as well as thermal conductive silicone sheets, which provide some rather kick ass heat dissipation and cooling performance.

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The company says that the onboard heatsink improves cooling of its NM1090 Gen5 SSD up by to 30%, while providing an RGB option as an add-on feature, which has a circular ring in the center, and is controllable through your motherboard software.

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Now, most importantly: capacities and pricing. Lexar's new NM1090 Gen5 SSD will be available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities while pricing is around $220 for 1TB, and around $372 for the 2TB model. There's no 4TB pricing just yet, so we should expect that in the coming weeks as the NM1090 Gen5 SSD becomes more available in more markets.