High Speed Multi-M.2 SSD Adapters Make an Appearance – Computex 2017 Update

If you have read our latest review of the Kingston DCP1000 SSD, you will see that multi-M.2 SSD designs can result in some of the highest speeds we have seen in SSD performance.  In the case of the Kingston DCP1000, we pulled off performance of 7GB/s throughput and 1.2 million IOPS from a single AIC (add-in card) HHHL design. This has never been done prior and the Kingston drive is a marvel of the relationship between Kingston and Liqid, its quality not to be underestimated with what we are showing here; it is an enterprise SSD.

Nonetheless, the multi-SSD HHHL AIC design is being explored once again, since its initial appearance way back in 2012 by Intel in their Intel 910 AIC SSD (our review here) , only now with M.2 SSDs.  Our coverage of the Highpoint SSD7101 adapter speaks of up to 12GB/s throughput with that adapter, a sample we believe is on its way for testing.

This week at Computex Taipei, Lycom Technology Incorporated displayed their latest four M.2 SSD adapter which contained a mix of Samsung 950 Pro and Plextor M.2 SSDs, which unfortunately was limited to a single ASUS motherboard as they are still very early in the test stage.

Somewhat interesting, however, is that performance was evident although scaling wasn’t nearly as good as we would like to see, with a high performance output of 8.6GB/s read and 2.6GB/s write with four M.2 SSDs.

We also found their results using two and three M.2 SSDs interesting, but a consistent disappointment in all was the low 4K random write performance which is pretty much the norm for any SSDs today.  Will these type of adapters become the norm?  No idea but the potential for that niche user that requires extremely high throughput is now right there in front of us, the Highpoint SSD 7101 probably being the first to hit the market.