14 DAY TRIAL // PCI Express solid state drives are an order or two of magnitude beyond all other SSDs in terms of capacity and performance. Except, perhaps, SATA Express and PCI Express-wired M.2 models, speed-wise anyhow.
Still, PCI Express remains the only form factor that can provide both a huge storage capacity and the highest transfer speeds among solid state drives.
It comes with the territory of having a large PCB. M.2 drives may be as fast as them under certain circumstances, but they are barely larger than a finger or two, meaning they don't often have more than 250 GB capacity.
Same for 2.5-inch SATA / SATA Express drives, though they do reach 512 GB or thereabouts under the correct circumstances.
The new PCI Express SSDs from BiTMICRO come in a very broad, very large capacity range indeed. The lowest-capacity model has “only” 1.5 TB, but the one at the higher extreme offers a full 6 TB.
It's a real shame that the company didn't actually say what transfer speeds they reached. It only said that the newcomers, the MAXio E-Series, were optimized for read-intensive applications, which we suppose means that there is a visible difference between the read and write speeds.
Even so, though, writing should be accomplished at 1 GB/s at the very least, maybe as high as 1.5-1.8 GB/s, while reads are accomplished at, maybe, over 2 GB/s.
The SSDs possess Dynamic Wear Leveling technology as well, allowing them to manage drive chip integrity and ensure a lifespan of at least 5 years.
Lifespan is quite important for SSDs, which have limited write cycles that even things like the TRIM command can't perfectly compensate for. Performance tends to drop over time, as rewrites and overwrites amass. Having 5-year guaranteed usability is important.
And just to make the MAXio E-Series user-friendly, BiTMICRO included the DrieLight management software, which lets you change various settings.
Sales should have already started for the BiTMICRO MAXio E-Series SSDs, at a price of $3.99 (€2.99) per GB, which means $6,000 / €4,500 (1.5 TB) to $24,000 / €18,000 (6 TB). Kind of steep, especially with certain alternatives, like SAS drives, selling for less than half of that.
As “ideal” as the company says its new inventions are for video streaming, online transaction processing, non-linear editing, video-on-demand, gaming, file servers, web applications, and cloud services, the price may put potential customers off anyway. Especially when no actual read/write numbers have been provided.