Nextorage NEM-PA 2TB
Sired by Sony, this SSD is seriously speedy
NEVER HEARD of Nextorage? Neither had we before this 2TB SSD landed in the MaximumPC labs. However, Nextorage is no obscure startup, even if its recent history is a little complicated. The company was born in 2019, founded by Sony as a direct subsidiary of Sony Storage Media Solutions Corporation, the idea being to produce SSDs for the PlayStation series of consoles. However, in early 2022, none other than Phison—a company famous for SSD controller chips—acquired a controlling stake in Nextorage and here we are reviewing the Nextorage NEM-PA 2TB, an M.2 with a broader remit that includes the PC.
Specs-wise, this is a high-end PCIe Gen 4 model. It packs 2TB of TLC 3D NAND flash memory and 2GB of DDR4 cache memory, all running over a quad-link interface. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the Phison acquisition, it runs the Phison E18 controller, a chip that has delivered excellent performance in a range of premium Gen 4 SSDs, including the Seagate Firecuda 530, PNY XLR8 CS3140, Corsair MP600 Pro XT, Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus and many more. It’s basically the go-to controller for companies not building their own in-house chip.
As for its claimed performance specs, Nextorage pegs this 2TB model at 7,300MB/s for reads and 6,900MB/s for writes. IOPS clock in at fully one million in both directions, all of which is par for the Phison E18 course, even if a few more recent drives with custom controllers, such as the SK Hynix Platinum P41 and Samsung 990 Pro offer significantly higher theoretical IOPS throughput.
Still, the Nextorage NEM-PA delivers decent write endurance at 1,400TB for this 2TB drive and a nice, reassuring fiveyear warranty. Nextorage also says that up to one-third of the drive’s capacity can be allocated to run in speedy SLC cache mode. And so it pretty much proves in practice. In our testing, the drive runs at full speed for around 625GB of writes before transfer speeds fall slightly before then dropping off more substantially after 800GB of writes.
READING ABILITY
Those figures are much higher than the competition, which is a good start. The 2TB version of the Samsung 990 Pro, for instance, only managed 230GB of writes at peak performance. Elsewhere, the Nextorage NEM-PA mostly maintains that impressive pace.
It is pretty much bang on the claimed numbers for sequential speeds, with 7,327MB/s reads and 6,867 writes, and therefore right up there with the very fastest drives. It’s not going to be until PCIe Gen 5 drives arrive that we see substantially faster peak SSD speeds.
The same goes for 4K random access performance, with the Nextorage NEMPA 2TB clocking up 83MB/s reads and 252MB/s writes, both figures very much in line with the best of the competition. Even more impressively, it does all that while staying remarkably cool. We recorded a peak temperature of just 39°C, some way below the 71°C of the SK Hynix Platinum P41 and 59°C of the Samsung 990 Pro. No doubt the hefty, nicely engineered heatsink originally designed to keep the drive cool inside the narrow confines of a PS5 console is a factor. But even so, this SSD runs remarkably cool.
If that’s an extremely impressive run for a hitherto unheralded SSD outfit, the NEM-PA does slightly underperform in PCMark 10, with bandwidth and latency that’s slightly short of the very fastest drives. The Samsung 990 Pro in particular is quite a bit quicker in PCMark 10. It’s not clear why this Nextorage drive didn’t quite cut it in PCMark. But it’s not enough to spoil what is a particularly strong first showing. At the right price and especially if you have concerns about operating temps, this SSD should certainly be on your shortlist.