They are small compared to most of their kind and have up to 512 GB capacity

Apr 3, 2014 08:24 GMT  ·  By

Solid-state drives designed in the PCI Express card form factor usually have much higher capacity and performance than SATA units, but this is only half true for the Plextor M6e line that has just got released.

Although, technically, they haven't really been released. More like they have been pre-announced, with the availability scheduled for April 7.

That's still better and sooner than we expected though. Back in early March, when we first got wind of the products, we only saw them because they were revealed at CeBIT 2014.

The trade show came and went (10-14 March), but many products shown at such conventions often take months before they reach the market.

Fortunately, the Plextor M63 only took a few weeks. The M6e are ready to land inside your PC, even if you have a really small one.

Sure, it will kind of defeat the purpose of making a low-cost system, since SSDs are pretty expensive compared to HDDs in general, and PCI Express ones take that to a higher level.

Nevertheless, Plextor designed the M6e solid-state drives with a low-profile PCI Express card, meaning they can be used in HTPCs and the like.

That did have an effect on capacity though, since the number of NAND Flash chips that could be installed was reduced because of the smaller PCB. Thus, the top capacity is of 512 GB.

For those who want the entire list, the Plextor M6e SSDs come in 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB versions, though they don't look too different.

All of them have Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) support and are compatible with standard BIOS, meaning they can easily be installed in your existing gaming rig, even if it's a few years old.

You can still select a UEFI Boost mode though, allowing you to use the SSDs as boot drives if you install Windows or whatever other operating system on them.

The new Plextor press release does not say what speeds the M6e solid-state drives possess, but fortunately, we know them since they were previously showcased. Reading is done at up to 770 MB/s, while writing is achieved at 635 MB/s.

Those are about half the speeds that high-end PCIe SSDs exhibit, but will allow the drives to sell for much less when they do show up for order on April 7. Until April 13, only Newegg will have them for sale.