Plextor M6e Black Edition PCIe SSD Review - Introduction

Plextor M6e Black Edition PCIe SSD

Plextor released an update of its M.2 Express based PCI Express SSD, we review the M6e Black Edition. An M.2. SSD mounted onto a PCI Express 2.0 x4 slot could be interesting for many. Alongside an aesthetic overhaul this product will be available in 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB volume sizes, all powered by a Marvell controller. Plextor developed a PCI-Express based SSD that can reach performance in the 700 to 800 MB/s range. Plextor released the M6e PCI-Express SSD in a Black Edition, this product slides into your PCI Express slot. Really, it makes use of an M.2 PCI Expess SSD. Why is that so important? Well, some of the the Z97/x99 and newer Series 9 motherboards will have that cute and tiny M.2 PCIe interface, but not all of them, and that is where this product comes into play. Small form factors add-in SSDs to the PC platform. There is an abbreviation for that, NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor). It is not just that though, SATA3 has not been among us for that long, but the SSDs evolved in a very fast manner, making SATA3 already a bottleneck for current generation SSDs. M2 PCIe links directly to your free PCIe lanes and as such, it is an interface with much more available bandwidth. See, at a cool 10 Gbps PCI-Express based M.2 has roughly 67% more bandwidth available opposed to SATA3 (6 Gbps). So that will definitely kick off a new SSD race in the upcoming months. 

The M6e Black Edition is powered by the latest dual-core Marvell 88SS9183 controller chip supporting Toggle NAND flash by Toshiba. You can expect read/write speeds of up to 770/625 MB/s in sequential mode, and 105K/100K IOPS for random read/write operations.

Why PCI-Express?

The development rate is going so fast that current component technology cannot keep up with the pace. 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 570 MB/sec already. The Plextor M6e products are PCIe SSDs that slips into an empty 4x or higher PCIe slot of your PC motherboard, thus freeing themselves from the SATA3 restrictions. The NAND flash memory is tied to a multi-channel controller. Now shake it, stir it, boil it and boom ... a very powerful storage solution will now be throwing silly numbers over the PCI-Express bus, instead of that limiting SATA connector. The Plextor M6e is using a Marvell controller and has a driver free design meaning it's bootable as OS storage unit as well. The low-profile PCIe 2.0 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.

Plextor delivers the product with PlexTools software, it offers a “Turbo” mode that eats away 25% of your system memory and uses it as a a data cache. 

The product can handle a maximum sustained data read speed is of 770 MB/s and the top write speed is of 580 MB/s. Meanwhile, the random 4K performance is hovering at 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 even a server. TRIM 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 as the new black edition certainly comes with outstanding looks.

Plextor 256GB M6e Black Edition PCI-Express SSD