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.