14 DAY TRIAL // The new M.2 solid-state drive form factor is a remarkable piece of work, using the PCI Express technology for tremendous performance without actually taking up any of the normal slots. Plextor has just released one such storage unit.
M.2 SSDs are, one might say, truly amazing things, capable of cramming as much storage space as a 2.5-inch drive (well, more or less), in a fraction of the space.
From what we've seen, an M.2 PCB is about as wide as a finger or two, and the thing isn't much longer than one either.
Then, there's the performance, clearly superior to anything allowed by SATA. Sure, SATA Express permits up to 12 Gbps now, but it's just as young as the M.2 interface, and trickier to implement, not to mention rarer.
So Plextor can only stand to gain from having released, or at least prepared to release, an M.2 solid-state drive.
Created with capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB, the M6s M.2 PCIe Gen2 x2 SSD is an ultra-fast piece of work.
Its read speed can reach 770 MB/s on a good day, while files are written at 625 MB/s. To provide perspective, let's see how a SandForce-based SATA III SSD compares.
It's kind of hard for the read speed to go over 550 MB/s, and often enough, the write speed doesn't go above the 500 MB/s mark.
M.2 technology gets even more noteworthy when you add the fact that other controllers barely scrape 400 MB/s, or 360 MB/s read and 300 MB/s write.
For those who want to know all the technical details about the Plextor M6e M.2 SSD, the drive measures 80 x 22 mm / 3.14 x 0.86 inches, and has random 4K read/write speeds of 105,000 / 100,000 IOPS.
That's on par with RAID setups of one or more HDDs/SSDs, but without the whole RAID array setup process itself.
A multi-core Marvell PCIe 9183 controller drives it, with the air of some DDR3 DRAM cache (256 MB / 512 MB / 1 GB). As for the actual capacity, it is supplied by Toshiba Toggle NAND Flash memory.
Finally, Plextor's Zero-Failure Zero-Error mass testing standard brought about a MTBF of 2.4 million hours, twice the endurance that SSDs normally exhibit. Sadly, the prices of the M6e M.2 Plextor SSDs were not disclosed.
"With the launch of the M6e M.2 PCIe we are expanding on the unprecedented success of the existing M6e HHHL PCIe. Now users of the fastest gaming notebooks and high power workstations will get access to the incredible performance of the M6e, and gain the benefits that only an ultra-fast, highly optimized Plextor M6e SSD can offer," said Plextor Senior Sales Manager, Lear Wu.