Should you buy an SSD from TEMU? (Lexar Thor Pro Review)

This SSD doesn’t seem to exist to us westerners – save for an entry in TechPowerUp’s database anyway, and yet if you shop on TEMU, you can get your hands on it. There is a lot that’s, how do I say this politely… confusing… about this drive, so let’s take a look and see what this drive – that doesn’t exist according to Lexar – has to offer, and whether or not you should be buying SSDs from Temu… This is the Lexar Thor Pro, and just on the face of it it seems like a pretty impressive drive, right? I mean up to 7GB/s, PCIe Gen4x4, and more style on the drive than most, this has got to be decent, right? Well… No. Ok first things first, looking on the back of the box you’ll see something a little confusing. Despite it saying PCIe Gen4x4 at the top, it says PCIe Gen 3 as the first bullet point! Aha, caught red handed! Oh no wait, google translate says that it’s saying it’s twice as fast as a Gen 3 drive… Well that makes sense… Ok, but maybe the drive is made out of cheese instead of NAND flash! Oh, no it’s an InnoGrit controller and Longsys flash – Longsys being Lexar’s parent company, and a bonafide NAND maker. Ok, so maybe it isn’t as bad as you might think then…

That doesn’t mean there aren’t some quirks! Using the InnoGrit NVME SSD flash id tool by Ochkin Vadim shows that this Longsys branded flash appears to be reporting as Intel 144L QLC packages, with 1024Gb per die, with eight total dies. Considering there’s only four actual flash chips on the board, I’d hazard a guess that it’s 2048Gb per chip, or 256GB packages. That’s quite the step down from the usual 1 or 2TB per chip I’ve seen from the likes of Micron with their 276 layer gen 9 flash!  To name the controller specifically, it’s an InnoGrit IG5236, a DRAMless PCIe Gen 4×4 NVMe 1.4 controller, and at least on this 1TB model, it’s only rated for 6500MB/s on reads, and a pretty shocking 3000MB/s on writes. Even on paper that’s slow, with Lexar’s western drives like the NM800 which even it’s 1TB model offers 7500MB/s on reads and 6300MB/s on writes. But of course, that’s the specs, let’s see if the performance figures tell the same story…

Starting with Crystal Disk Mark, the Thor Pro comes in… dead last, even behind the middling Orico E5000. Admittedly the reads are midfield with a slight spec-beating 6.65GB/s, with the writes being the major letdown at 2.77GB/s – even on a completely fresh drive. As a point of east-west comparison, Lexar’s own NM800 drive offers near chart topping gen 4 read performance, and while it’s not quite as strong on writes, it’s still over twice as fast as the Thor Pro… That’s significant! With a queue depth of one instead of eight we see equally bottom-of-the-barrel performance, at least besting the Orico E5000 this time. Interestingly about half the drives offer faster reads than writes, while the others are opposite. This Thor Pro is the former, with actually somewhat respectable reads for a gen 4 drive, but the second slowest on writes. Amazingly, with a random 4KB block size and a queue depth of 32, the Thor Pro and the NM800 are functionally tied on writes, although the Thor Pro did offer the slowest reads I’ve tested. It’s a similar story with a queue depth of one although here it’s only a slight dip in performance in both reads and writes from the NM800.

As for AS SSD, at least on the sequential test it’s the same story as Crystal Disk Mark, with the read performance being pretty typical for a gen 4 drive, but the write performance being literally gen 3 speeds. Again the NM800 offers twice the performance here. With a random 4K block, amazingly, at least on write performance, the Thor Pro actually beats the NM800! It is effectively tied with the Orico E5000 for the slowest gen 4 drive on reads, but those writes really aren’t bad! Unfortunately for the Thor Pro, if you increase the threads to 64, you’ll start to struggle by comparison. It came in second to last – behind a gen 3 drive (the WD SN750) – in both reads and writes. That’s not exactly promising performance!

In ATTO we see a few more interesting trends, although my god the NM800 is all over the place! A noticeable dip at 4K, flatlined between 32 and 256K, but excellent performance at the top end. Our Thor Pro though is middling here too, with a flat spot at 64 and 128K, and a sharp drop off in performance with 32MB and larger blocks on reads. Write performance is basically a flat line, but it is lower than even a Gen 3 drive (the SN750) which isn’t exactly amazing.

Actually copying data was a little disappointing. Copying from a RAMDISK to try and get the best performance, all this could do was 2.5GB/s, which is gen 3 speeds. Copying from a faster Gen 4 drive was also capped around 2.5GB/s, which I suppose isn’t much of a surprise, but still. My usual duplication stress test returned 1.4GB/s, which isn’t amazing either. It isn’t terrible, but it’s not exactly amazing. Even more interestingly, after just 180GB the SLC cache filled up and performance utterly tanked. Some drives can give gigabytes per second – the T710 being a great example – but this offers between 0 and 400MB/s, averaging out around 150MB/s or so. That’s hard drive territory. Oh, and this isn’t a temperature problem. The drive hit I think 47°c at most, which is well below the SMART throttling limit. For context, the NM800 was able to copy from the same fast Gen 4 drive at up to 3.4GB/s, almost 1GB/s faster than the Thor Pro, the duplication sat at around 2GB/s with peaks up to 2.4GB/s or so, and when the SLC cache ran out after 350GB, it offered around 700 to 900MB/s at first, then around 400 to 500 MB/s after that. That’s a significant improvement by comparison!

The confusing thing here is that you’d expect this thing would be an absolute bargain. I mean isn’t that what Temu is all about? The cheapest tat you can find for pennies? Well this thing isn’t that. This 1TB model is £64 – which makes it more expensive than Crucial’s P310 and P3 Plus, and a myriad of other gen 4×4 drives that offer considerably better performance! Seriously! If this was like £30, then sure, I get it. It’s worse than its western counterparts,  but for the price it’d be hard to argue. But at £64… No chance. Do not buy this, unless like the kind viewer who sent this in you have a whole bunch of Temu credit (thanks Chris!). As for the wider question of whether or not you should buy SSDs from Temu… Well I’ll say this: I wouldn’t. That might be because it’s just not as good as drives you can buy on Amazon, it might be because you’re more likely to get fakes or knockoffs, or it might be because it isn’t even cheaper! Regardless, I wouldn’t – but that’s me, I’d love to hear what you think in the comments down below.