14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives come in many different shapes, sizes and capacities, with their performance arguably covering an even wider range of numbers. There always seems to be a type of SSD making more rounds in the press than the rest though, and Lite-On has latched onto the current star.
We're referring to the M.2 form factor, which has only been around for a few months but has been winning people over quite rapidly.
Why? Because it is new, for one thing, and novelty can be a powerful factor. Enough to offset the fact that only the latest motherboards support the new SSD technology, since the M.2 interface isn't any older than the new, finger-thin shape of the PCB.
For such small solid state drives, though, M.2 drives can be surprisingly capacious and fast. The Lite-On EP1 Series M.2 PCIe may not be the best when it comes to the former, but they have quite a bit of storage space at least.
The specifications of the EP1 Series M.2 PCIe SSDs
The top capacity is of 1 TB, which is more than most SATA drives can boast, despite that form factor being a lot larger than this one.
PCI Express drives still remain unrivaled here, but even they don't usually go too far beyond 1.5 TB or so, meaning that the EP1 Series doesn't have such a big disadvantage here.
More important is the performance. The Random 4K read speed is of 150,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second), while the random 4K write speed is of 44,000 IOPS.
The sequential read/write speeds weren't mentioned in the company press release, so we can only try to guess them based on others SSD's sequential / random 4K performance correlation.
The read speed will probably be of between 800 MB/s and 1,100 MB/s, while the write speed might be lower than 1,000 MB/s. We've encountered 1.8 GB/s M.2 SSDs, but those have PCI Express x8 interfaces, not x4. That said, the latencies are of 40/30 μs read/write.
Other features include customized firmware and multiple data protection layers, making the newcomers good for online transaction processing (OTP), SQL logging, collaboration, financial transactions and e-mail servers.
Finally, the Lite-On EP1 Series M.2 PCIe SSDs have an endurance of 1 drive write per day for 5 years, and a MTBF of 2 million hours.
Availability and pricing
Sadly, Lite-On did not specify this information in its press release. Given the target customers though, that's not surprising, since it means that final tags will depend on order size, contractual obligations and haggling.