Plextor Targets PC Gamers With M6e Black Edition PCIe SSD, Teases Ultra-Fast M7e

You’d think that an enthusiast-level storage device (one that’s likely to sit near a PC’s case window, we might add) would look cooler than the Plextor M6e.  Well, Plextor solved that at CES 2015 this week when it unveiled the M6e Black Edition. The PCI Express SSD now feature its own metal chassis and a deep red heatsink.

Plextor showed off its M6e Black Edition PCIe SSD
The Plextor M6e Black Edition PCIe SSD on display at the Aria hotel in Las Vegas during CES 2015.

Plextor’s Global Sales Manager Lear Wu showed us the M6e Black Edition, which offers some speed improvements over the original M6e. It has the same Marvell 88SS9183 controller as its predecessor, but Plextor tells us that device is capable of 105K/100K IOPS for random read/write operations. That’s faster than the M6e, but Plextor says that both devices are capable of the same 770 MBs read and 625MBs write speeds in sequential mode. The M6e Black Edition also feature PlexTurbo 2.0, which is SSD caching utility software. You’ll see 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB models hit stores by the end of the month.

PlexTurbo 2.0 software improves the performance of the Plextor M6e Black Edition.
This display shows the performance improvement from PlexTurbo 2.0

Wu also talked a bit about the M7e, which was formally unveiled at CES 2015. The M7e has a PCI Gen. 2x4 interface, which means it has four PCI Express lanes to the M6e’s two, supporting up to 2GBs. Read/write speeds are expected to be over 1GBs, but haven’t been made official yet. Expect to see more of the M7e later in the year.