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Our second private meeting yesterday was at the Aria with Plextor, a leading producer of performance-oriented flash storage devices. At this meeting they were unveiling two new solid state drives. The first is the M7e, a Gen 2×4 M.2 SSD, which they are promoting as the fastest SSD in the market today. There second announcement was of the M6e Black Edition for gamers, which we previously covered when photos and supposed performance numbers were leaked.
The M7e joins the Samsung XP941 as the only M.2 SSDs that feature a PCIe Gen 2×4 interface. This allows for up to 2GB of information to be passed through in as little as one second. Plextor hopes to have availability of the new M7e late in Q2 of 2015, which also coincides with Computex 2015. The test system set up in the Aria suite was generating sequential read speeds of 1411MB/s and sequential write speeds of 1028MB/s from the 1TB veresion in the display system.
Also being unveiled was the M6e Black Edition, a slick-looking PCIe drive that is geared towards serious gamers. The original M6e was built on a rather generic-looking standard green PCB. The M6e Black Edition is built on a much more attractive black PCB, and is enhanced with an attractive black and red shroud that will look great in any windowed PC enclosure.
The M6e Black Edition also includes the newest version of Plextor’s PlexTurbo performance-enhancing software. This new PlexTurbo 2.0 pumps the sequential read performance of the M6e Black Edition up to an amazing 8501MB/s and sequential write speed of 8309MB/s!
The Black Edition is a little unusual in that it features two power connections, as seen in the image below. In addition to a standard 15-pin SATA power connection along the top edge, it also has a 2-pin connector for a secondtwo-pin power connection along the rear edge for the drive activity indicator LED. Plextor is backing the M6e Black Edition with a five-year warranty.
In our meeting yesterday with Lear Wu, Global Sales Manager at Plextor, we discussed product roadmaps, including the PlexTurbo software. I had inquired if there were plans to have a newer version of the PlexTurbo software that could be used with previous version of the M6e and other drives, possibly enabled via a firmware update. Lear indicated that he agreed that there would be significant value in doing so, but without making any specific commitment he summed up their philosophy as one of offering at least one new enhancement or concept or feature per year for their customers.
Stay tuned for further developments and announcement as we continue our private meetings and show floor exploration here in Las Vegas at CES 2015.