Biostar is expanding its line of solid state drives with the new M700 series, and it represents the fastest storage product in the company's stable. However, the M700 series won't be able to keep up with the recent crop of best NVMe SSDs that leverage the PCI Express 4.0 bus.
To be fair, that doesn't matter much for gaming—several of the best SSDs for gaming are still older SATA 6Gbps models. They're comparatively pokey to NVMe SSDs, and especially the blazing fast ones that tap into the PCIe 4.0 bus, but those speed gains don't really translate to games.
As for the M700 series, Biostar is pushing out two capacities—512GB (M700-512GB) and 256GB (M700-256GB). They are both M.2 form factor drives, with an NVMe interface supporting PCIe 3.0.
Performance varies by capacity. The larger 512GB model is the faster of the two, with rated sequential reads of up to 2,000MB/s and sequential writes of up to 1,600MB/s. On the 256GB model, those figures dip to 1,850MB/s on the read side and 950MB/s on the write side, the latter of which is a much steeper drop.
Depending on how these drives end up being priced, they could be interesting additions, or rather boring—Biostar is introducing these drives right as the Black Friday deals season is about to start, and there will likely be a lot of bargains on the SSDs in the coming days and weeks.
I've reached to Biostar for information on pricing and availability, and will update this article when/if I hear back.
