Stefan Mileschin

At Computex 2014, we're expecting the proverbial Noah's Flood of new SSDs in the M.2 form-factor, which overcome the bandwidth limitation of SATA 6 Gb/s, and aren't as messy when installed as SATA-Express. The first generation of M.2, at its physical layer, is PCI-Express 2.0 x2, with a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 1000 MB/s per direction. Among the first such drives is the XP941 from Samsung. The drive went into mass production way back in June 2013, but it's only now hitting the stores, as the first motherboards with M.2 slots launched, with the advent of Intel's 9-series chipset.

What sets this drive apart from conventional M.2 drives is it follows a draft specification that mandates PCI-Express 2.0 x4 interface. When installed on slots with x4 wiring, the drive offers sequential read speeds of up to 1,170 MB/s, and up to 930 MB/s maximum writes. It also offers 4K random read performance of up to 122,000 IOPS, and 4K random write performance of up to 72,000 IOPS. The only 9-series motherboard with such a slot is the Z97 Extreme6 by ASRock. You could also try using PCI-Express 2.0 x4 add-on cards such as the one Plextor's M6e comes with. The 512 GB variant of the drive is priced at 79,800 JPY including local taxes (US $780).

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