Mach Xtreme MX Express SSD Review - Introduction

Mach Xtreme MX Express 512GB PCI-Express SSD from 500 goin to 800MB/s 

In the past Guru3D.com has reviewed a handful of Mach Xtreme products already. Always price versus performance products that are attractive. In this review Mach Xtreme decided to go a little more Extreme and decided to think outside the box - and hey we love that ! They developed a PCI-Express based SSD that can reach performance up-to 800~850 Mb/sec. Incredible numbers really, but is that performance across the board, or just here and there in certain conditions we figured ?

So Hilbert why PCI-Express ?

The development rate is going so fast that current component technology cannot keep up with the pace. See, we had the transition to SATA 3 (6G) and the minute SATA 3 came out these new 6G controllers already started reaching their maximum bandwidth with the latest generation SSDs which can reach 560 MB/sec already. The Mach Xtreme MX Express products are a PCIe SSD  based on a RAID 0 solid state drive which slips into the PCIe slot of your PC motherboard, thus freeing themselves from the SATA3 restrictions. The bare essence of that product is to simply put multiple SSD clusters into one product. The NAND flash memory is tied to multi-channel controllers, and these controllers then lead towards another controller, a RAID controller. They put it in the pan, stir it, shake it, boil it and boom ... your RAID0 array is throwing silly numbers over the PCI-Express bus, instead of that limiting SATA connector. The MX-EXPRESS is using a dual-controller (SandForce) technology and has a driver-less design. The low-profile MX-EXPRESS PCIe 2.0 x2 SSD card promises to deliver a good desktop computing experience with fast application loading times, ultra-fast data access and shorter boot-ups of today’s and future high-end desktops featuring PCIe 2x / 4x /16x interface. Available in capacities of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB.

MSRP:

• 128GB @ 299EUR
• 256GB @ 389EUR
• 512GB @ 699EUR
• 1TB @ 1399EUR

Basically two SandForce controllers have been setup in RAID with the help of a Marvell 9x00 series RAID controller. It is thanks to the SandForce 2281 controllers that the maximum sustained data read speed is of 850 MB/s and the top write speed is of 800 MB/s. Meanwhile, the random 4K performance is of 100,000 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second). Add to that a life expectancy of 2.5 million hours and an operating temperature of 0-70 degrees and you don't need to worry about much when building your server. TRIM, RAID 0 support, DuraClass, RAISE Protection and Garbage Collection technologies are all supported as well. All in all we'll have quite a bit to talk about (and show you) today, but have a peek at the product being tested today first we'd say. 

Mach Xtreme MX Express 512GB PCI-E SSD