Plextor Releases M6e M.2 SSD Drive – Perfect For Z97

One of the flagship selling points of Intel’s new 9 Series chipsets has been the ability to utilise faster storage mediums, notably the 10 Gbps M.2 ports most Z97 motherboards come equipped with. Up until recently these have been fairly hard to come by but now Plextor have released their first “standalone” M.2 drive. I say standalone because the Plextor M6e has been out for a while but initially it came attached to a PCI Express riser card whereas now it is available to buy as an M.2 drive only.

Plextor’s M6e M.2 drive uses the 2280 (80 x 22 mm) form factor and offers speeds of up to 770MB/s read and 625MB/s writes. Random 4K reads offer up to 105K IOPS and random 4K writes up to 100K IOPS. The M6e makes use of a Marvell PCIe 9183 controller, DDR3 RAM cache and Toshiba Toggle NAND. The drive runs custom Plextor in-house firmware.

Plextor will be offerring three additional M.2 drives with the M6G 2280 (22mm x 80mm), M6G 2260 (22mm x 60mm) and M6G 2242 (22mm x 42mm). All Plextor M6e series drives come with a 5 year warranty and a MTBF of 2.4 million hours. Pricing is as follows:

• 128GB M6e  – MSRP £92.99 – Buy at Overclockers UK
• 256GB M6e – MSRP £169.99 – Buy at Overclockers UK
• 512GB M6e – MSRP £299.99 – Buy at Overclockers UK

Source: Plextor PR

Images courtesy of Plextor