SATA has been the way to go for the past decade when it comes to hard disk drive and solid state drive, but a new rise in PCI-Express is allowing fans of super speed storage to surpass the 6gbps limit. Plextor has announced three new SSDs to keep the rise of PCI-Express alive and offer something price friendly to fans of SSD.
The three SSDs are quite similar, all M6e M.2 coming in sizes 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. The PCI-Express bypasses the 6gbps limit on SATA, offering 770mbps read speeds and 335mbps write speeds. The speed of the new PCI-Express connectors allows faster boot times, saving and loading.
Toshiba NAND flash memory and DDR3 DRAM cache have been added to the Plextor solid state drives, allowing faster saving and loading. Flash memory is a huge step up on speed and is used on Apple’s iPhone and various high-end Android phones, to load apps and boot the phone quicker.
PCI-Express: The Future of SSD
Most computers will not be compatible with Plextor’s new SSDs, they need to have PCI-Express connectors, something only a handful of notebooks and motherboards currently support. Intel will be rolling out new motherboards with PCI-E connectors and we suspect in the near future more motherboard manufacturers will support the move to PCI-Express.
Adapters are available instead of changing the motherboard, these come for a small price and are easy to set up. This is the most efficient solution for anyone looking to buy a PCI-Express SSD right now, but we would recommend looking into the advantages and if it is really cost effective to pay into a new SSD, especially if you already own one.
Advantages of PCI-Express SSD
Even though the advantages of changing from SATA to PCI-Express could be huge in terms of file movement, sharing and the speed of opening programs, the actual difference for a normal user may be minimal, especially if they can last a two second wait time.
We could see PCI-Express being very effective for small businesses running servers and even people who store a lot of applications on their computer. Saving files is also a big incentive for PCI-Express SSD, because the save time can add up and with the new SSDs from Plextor and other brands, they will relieve some seconds everyday.
