California manufacturer Lexar has announced a new version of its main line of hard drives for mass consumption. We are talking about the Lexar NM790 with 8 TB, the largest capacity that the industry offers in SSDs for client devices.

It doesn’t matter what capacity your storage device has; you will eventually fill it out. It’s a “principle” that’s been talked about in computing for three decades, and even though there are more options today when it comes to the number of drives available in a PC or their larger capacity, it’s still often met. And the amount of digital data to manage and store continues to grow, and users tend to install a lot and clean up little.

Lexar NM790 with 8TB Do you need that much?

The truth is, no, except in certain cases. In addition, current computers usually include connectors for multiple SSDs, and it usually pays to install, for example, two 4TB drives rather than one 8TB one. And very few manufacturers offer this capacity for the consumer market and its price is still usually high. But if you need it, here it is: the maximum SSD capacity you’ll find in consumption.

The new version continues the foundation of its smaller sisters, betting on the interface PCIe 4×4 and not Gen5, better in performance but more problematic. Its format is the standard M.2 2280, which can be installed on desktop computers, laptops or to expand the capacity of video game consoles (Lexar promotes them especially for the PS5). You can optionally get a heatsink unit, but it won’t be necessary if you use the one from your own motherboard.

The drive has support for NVMe and features advanced HMB 3.0 and Dynamic SLC Cache technologies that offer fast data transfer speeds 7000 and 6200 Mbytes per second in sequential read-write mode. In random IOPS we have 850,000 / 900,000 (read/write). Not bad at all considering its 8 Tbyte capacity.

Its mean time between failures rises to 1,500,000 hours and the manufacturer guarantees a minimum of 6,000 TBW (terabytes written). It is sold with a five-year warranty and is already available at some European retailers. New technologies or innovative components are not cheap and here you have to pay almost 900 euros to buy them. We believe that the Lexar NM790 with 8TB will have an official price of around $800. In Spain, versions with 1, 2 and 4 Tbytes can be purchased with adjusted prices, from 97 to 311 euros.