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 ?