Plextor is looking to give Samsung for its money in the NVMe storage space, which taps into the PCIe bus for faster performance. While Samsung's 960 Evo series is one of the more popular options that balances price and performance, Plextor hopes to give the company some competition with it M8Se series starting at €83.
System builders will have three different types of M8Se SSDs to choose from, including a half-height PCIe add-in card variant (M8Se-Y) and two M.2 2280 models, one with a thick aluminum heatsink (M8Se-G) that makes direct contact with the memory chips and one that is bare (M8Se-GN), the latter of which would be suitable for laptops with not a lot of clearance.
Each variant pairs triple-level cell (TLC) NAND flash memory with a Marvell 88SS1093 controller to deliver up to 2,450MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 1,000MB/s of sequential writes on its two most capacious models, along with 4K random reads and writes of up to 210,000 IOPS and 175,000 IOPS, respectively. Performance is slightly slower than Plextor's existing M8Pe drives, thanks to the use of TLC instead of MLC NAND, but pricing should also be lower.
These new drives are expected to be available in June in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities. According to TechPowerUp, pricing will range from €83 (128GB) to €494 (1TB). Plextor is backing these drives with 3-year warranties.
Samsung's 960 Evo line still holds a performance advantage, with its drives rated to deliver up to 3,200MB/s of read performance and up to 1,900MB/s of write performance. But again, it will likely come down to pricing, as most NVMe drives perform well but cost a lot. The M8Se will still cost more than Intel's budget-friendly 600p series, but we still have to see how it performs.
