14 DAY TRIAL // It looked as though the M.2 solid-state drive form factor was one that relied on the PCI Express interface to settle in a PC, but now it's been shown that it ultimately falls to the controller chip to decide.
Case in point, the M.2 SSD that Kingston will introduce at this year's Computex trade show (June 3-7, Taipei, Taiwan) uses SATA technology instead. It's all because of the Phison PS3108 controller chip.
Obviously, the performance will not be nearly as high as the one afforded by the PCI Express technology. PCIe has a much greater bandwidth after all.
Tests showed a top read speed of 540 MB/s and a maximum writing speed of 514 MB/s, which are the same as for normal SATA III units.
A real shame, since the 256 DDR3 memory (capacity not confirmed) could probably let the storage product go a lot faster if only there were room in the SATA connection.
As it is, Kingston's creation is definitely leagues behind the 1.8 GB/s afforded by the LSI-SandForce 3700 to the ADATA M.2 SSD introduced yesterday.
Then again, the ADATA drive would cut into the performance of graphics cards on at least some motherboards, because the CPU root complex would have to allocate bandwidth to the M.2 socket at the expense of the PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot.
Then again, it's not like the Kingston storage unit is free from compatibility problems. Motherboards like the ASUS Z97-A might not support it at all, due to how the M.2 interface is handled.
All in all, the M.2 market, even young as it is, looks something like a unicorn sandwich: it has lots of things to offer, but compatibility limitations are severe enough to make one think twice about buying the things.
At least the storage options for the Kingston SM2280S3 (that's the name of the drive) are decent, even if they don't come even close to the 1 TB of ADATA's mode: 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB.
Sadly, the prices haven't been disclosed, which is a shame because they should be among, if not the lowest in this new segment. They'd have to be, in order to get not just prospective buyers sold on them, but also to persuade motherboard makers to wire their M.2 slots via the SATA technology instead of PCI Express. Or through both, just to be safe. No doubt, the full information will be released at Computex 2014, June 3-7, Taipei, Taiwan.
