Plextor M6e PCI Express SSD Review - Introduction

Plextor M6e PCI-Express SSD Throttling from from 1 to 770 in 0.1 Milliseconds

Today we have a review of a product that should have your attention. Plextor released the M6e PCI-Express SSD, this product slides into your PCI Express slot, but more importantly ... it makes use of an M.2 PCI Expess SSD. Why is that so important ? Well, the upcoming Z97 and newer motherboards will likely all have that cute and tiny M.2 PCIe interface. That brings small form factors add-in SSDs to our PC platform.

There is an abbreviation for that, NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor). It is not just that though, SATA3 has not been amongst 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. 

Z97 is not out yet, but M2 products are PCI Express ready and as such for plextor it is easy peasy to place an M2 PCIe SSd onto a daughter board. And these two combined offer a PCI Express SSD with a single controller that will scream performance. Plextor developed a PCI-Express based SSD that can reach performance up-to 770 MB/sec. Incredible numbers really, but is that performance across the board, or just here and there in certain conditions we figured ?

Why PCI-Express ?

Well as explained above, 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 Plextor M6e products are a PCIe SSD 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-less design. 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.

MSRP:

• 128GB @ 299EUR
• 256GB @ 389EUR
• 512GB @ 699EUR

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 2.4 million hours and an operating temperature of 0-70 degrees and you don't need to worry about much when building your 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. 

Plextor 256GB M6e PCI-Express SSD