Performance M.2 PCI-E SSD Storage Performance

M.2 PCI-E SSD Storage Performance

Aside from its naming I am pretty stoked about M.2 as I have checked out what it can do and immediately got excited. I think M.2 will be wider adopted than SATA Express this year because it is easy, handy, transferable to any M.2 ready PC and it doesn't need complex RAID setups. That brings small form factors add-in SSDs to our PC platform at blazing fast speeds. There is an abbreviation for that, NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor). It is not just that though, SATA3 has not been amongst us for that long, but the SSDs evolved in a very fast manner, making SATA3 already a bottleneck for current generation SSDs as SATA3 SSDs end at roughly 570 MB/sec in terms of read/write performance. 
 

Above - an M.2 SSD being seated onto the M.2 Slot

M.2 PCI-E SSDs are merely small form factor SSDs that communicate over your PCI Express lanes, providing 10 Gbps of bandwidth, eliminating SATA3 bottlenecks. The cool thing with this motherboard is that it gets increased bandwith to 32 Gbps by using a x4 PCI-Express link provided by the chipset. The M6e combines the latest generation Marvell 88SS9183 dual-core server-grade controller and carefully selected synchronous Toshiba Toggle NAND flash.

M.2 PCI-E links directly to your PCI-E lanes and as such, it is an interface with much more available bandwidth. You can expect performance in the 700 MB/sec range with these products. We ran some tests with a Plextor M6 M.2 SSD unit. This specific product can handle a maximum sustained data read speed of well over 700 MB/s and a top write speed of 550 MB/s.