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Nextorage is hoping the NEM-PAC will be the next drive you buy, and everything is in place for that to happen. This no-frills, heatsink-clad SSD has plenty of performance and a good warranty, but could appearances be deceiving? The Phison-linked company delivers a drive that’s hiding a Silicon Motion controller and Samsung flash, which does raise some questions. However, whether or not the drive is good is not one of them, as performance as a whole, in our testing, promises a good experience for any user. It’s not made for laptop users, but in every other way, it’s competitive at 1TB and 2TB capacities.

Nextorage NEM-PAC Specifications

The Nextorage NEM-PAC is available at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB, although we did not see the 4TB available at the time of review. Pricing comes in at $179.99 and $289.99 for the first two capacities. This puts it squarely up against the Biwin Black Opal NV7400, which makes sense as they have comparable hardware. The NEM-PAC hits up to 7,400 MB/s / 6,400 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,000K / 1,050K random read and write IOPS. These numbers are right in line with expectations.

The drive also has the standard five-year warranty, but, importantly, is warrantied for up to 750TB of writes per TB capacity. The normal amount is 600TB, so this is 25% more than usual. This is not a huge difference, but it’s enough to swing things in the drive’s favor if that matters to you. Having a higher TBW rating can bring some extra peace of mind.

Nextorage NEM-PAC Software and Accessories

Nextorage offers no direct downloads for its drives. We recommend CrystalDiskInfo to check and monitor drive health and CrystalDiskMark for basic benchmarking. For backing up your data, we suggest MultiDrive for Windows – version 1.4 came out during the writing of the review – and Clonezilla for everything else.

Nextorage NEM-PAC: A Closer Look

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A no-nonsense drive with a simple but effective heatsink. This is really all you need, unless you are putting it into a laptop. Removal of the heatsink via the side screws should be possible if absolutely necessary. If you intend to reuse a heatsink like this, make sure to replace thermal padding/adhesive as necessary.

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What we have here is the four-channel, DRAM-less Silicon Smotion SM2268XT2 SSD controller with four NAND flash packages. Each package is labeled 512G, for 512GiB, which means this 2TB drive is single-sided. The flash is harder to discern, but we were able to pinpoint it as Samsung’s 236-Layer TLC. This is somewhat unusual to see, but Samsung flash popping up in drives does happen, given the current flash shortage. The controller choice already suggests that Nextorage is shopping around, so this flash showing up is not a full anomaly. This flash made its full debut with the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro, and it delivers good performance, particularly good random read performance, in our testing.

What’s more interesting is that Nextorage – once a property tied to Sony that was since acquired by Phison – uses an SMI controller. Things are tough out there. Phison also tends to pair with Kioxia/SanDisk or Micron flash, so seeing Samsung here is different. It’s not unusual for drives to mix things up, but we have to keep an eye on reliability when this happens. We expect a better floor for Nextorage – and the higher TBW supports this, which we feel remains intact.

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Shane Downing is a Freelance Reviewer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering consumer storage hardware.