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As you might deduce from the name, the Lexar Play 2280, is a 2280 form factor (22mm wide, 80mm long) NVMe SSD. It’s PCIe 4 x4, and uses fast, recent-vintage TLC NAND that’s controlled by a Maxio MAP1602A-FC3. That controller means the Play 2280 is a host memory buffer design — it uses your device’s system memory for primary caching. Being a host memory buffer (HMB) design is not a bad thing per se. Indeed, HMB designs are highly competitive with DRAM designs in sequential transfers and usually far cheaper. Where HMB designs are generally slower is in random performance, but I still recommend t

Now here’s the crux of our complaint. Lexar lists the 4TB version of the Play 2280 at $380 (although Amazon currently has it for $350). According to Lexar, there is a 2TB version for $250 that will be available in October, and an 8TB version following that. Those prices are almost twice as much as the least expensive HMB designs, although those generally use QLC NAND, which is far slower when written natively than the Play 2280’s TLC. But the Play 2280 also costs a lot more than what you’ll pay for a fast PCIe 4.0 DRAM design such as the Solidigm P44 Pro or Crucial T500. A DRAM design will pro

The Play 2280’s performance was a yin-and-yang type of deal. It was very fast sequentially, but ran out of steam in CrystalDiskMark 8’s 4K tests with our standard 64GB data set. AS SSD 2.0 (not shown) uses a smaller 10GB data set and turned in normal 4K numbers. When we knocked CrystalDiskMark 8 down to a 32GB data set, the 4K numbers soared. Alas, all the numbers we’ve gathered for the Play 2280’s competition are with the 64GB data set so that’s what’s shown and used for ranking. The Play 2280 did quite well in our real-world 48GB and 450GB write, though bear in mind our real-world is Windows

No. At least not for your PlayStation. I admire the looks of the Play 2280, and there’s nothing wrong with the drive per se, other than its weak 4K performance with 64GB of data. But pricing an HMB design as if it has DRAM on board, then marketing it for the PlayStation 5, which doesn’t support HMB, is suspect — cool-looking heatsink or not. If you want the best performance for your PlayStation, buy a DRAM design such as the aforementioned Solidigm P44 Pro or Crucial T500. If you want an HMB SSD (which will work, just not optimally) then buy something like the Teamgroup T-Force G50, which is h