Plextor is adding the M8Pe to its line of solid state drives. It's a four-lane PCI-Express NVMe drive with the M.2 form factor that allows for better airflow and cooling. The M8Pe is the first Plextor drive that uses the NVMe protocol, which reduces latency and allows for faster speeds. It's the end of SATA as we know it, folks, and we feel great.
Plextor says that the PCIe connection enables 4KB random read performance up to 270,000 IOPS, and 4KB write performance up to 150,000 IOPS. It also features intelligent RAM caching, and smart compression technology to boost performance and storage capacity. For reference, the M.2 Samsung 950 Pro SSD promises 270,000 IOPS on 4K random reads and 110,000 on random writes, or 2500 MB/s / 1500 MB/s sequential read/write speeds. So yeah: these things are fast.
In addition, the M8Pe has a feature allowing private data to be hidden securely on shared computers. Unlike some of the other PCIe-based SSDs we've seen at the show, the M8e doesn't make its M.2 form-factor drive easily accessible to remove from the PCIe board and place into an M.2 slot.
Plextor hasn't yet released details about the price or when the M8Pe is coming out, but this year is a safe bet.
