Already last year Plextor announced their new M6 Series SSD, where there were models with M.2 Formfactor. Since these drives are capable of hitting performance limitations set by the SATA-III interface, Plextor came up with a solution for that. It looks like the manufacturer placed the drive on a PCI-Express card and the controller is capable of letting a UEFI BIOS know that this is actually a boot device.


The reason why Plextor came up with this idea is simple. Just check out the sequential throughput numbers and you'll see, these drives have quite a bit more to offer than just SATA-III speeds. The manufacturer clams that the M6e is able to hit 770 Megabyte per second sequential read speeds and up to 625 Megabyte per second sequential write speed. In case of random IOPS the M6e should be capable of hitting 105K for random read and 100K IOPS for random write.

Plexotrs M6e PCI-Express SSD is based on the Marvell 88SS9183 multicore Controller. This particular controller features PCI 2.0 support and apart from that there is high performance Toggle NAND from Toshiba. According to Plextor there will be models with 128 Gigabyte, 256 Gigabyte as well as 512 Gigabyte capacity. The drives will become available this month.






Source: Plextor