Straddling the worlds of M.2 and PCIe. Storage company Plextor has experimented with producing solid-state drives (SSD) using various form factors. SATA remains the overriding favourite even though it's limited in terms of interface speed, but Plextor has also released drives using the M.2 and PCIe form factors.

But rather than wait for the industry to shift to these faster standards, particularly PCIe, Plextor made the move to use both M.2 and PCIe concurrently by packaging an M.2 drive with a PCIe card that fits into the standard expansion slots on a modern motherboard.

This hybrid approach leads to the M6e drive mating a Marvell 88SS9183 controller with Toshiba NAND connecting to the system either via the bare M.2 drive or via AHCI-compliant PCIe through the use of an adapter card. The drive supports a maximum speed of PCIe 2.0 x2, or 8Gbit/s, so having a faster connection to the system, via PCIe, is of no immediate benefit, and the real-world transfer ceiling is likely to be closer to 6.4Gbit/s (800MB/s).