While not the fastest PCIe SSD to come through the 'Labs, the Plextor M9Pe delivers a lot of bang for your buck. Available with or without a heatsink, this compact, M.2 form factor SSD is powered by Marvell's 88SS1093 controller and is available with up to 1TB of Toshiba's 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND flash. Combine this with Plextor's PlexNitro technology and a PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe 1.2 interface and you have a drive capable of delivering nearly six times the performance of your average SATA 6Gb/s SSD. In our sequential read and write tests, the 256GB version of the M9Pe was able to read at speeds as high as 3,042 MB/s and write at speeds in excess of 1,060 MB/s. The M9Pe also performed fairly well when doing random reads, but lagged behind other PCIe SSDs in our random write tests, producing less than 70,000 IOPS.