Plextor revealed the M6 series SSDs today at IFA in Berlin and also displayed SSDs specifically designed for usage in Ultrabooks. The M6 series is the successor of Plextor's M5 Series.
The M6 drives will become available in a Pro version and a S version. Plextor states that the Pro version is targeted at the high performance segment and the S version to the average computer user. Plextor has not released any performance specifications and available capacities for the M6. The company also states they don't have a release schedule yet.
Besides the M6 series, Plextor also showed new SSDs specifically targeted for use in Ultrabooks. For Ultrabooks Intel has developed the New Generation Form Factor (NGFF), also known as M.2. With the limit space available in the thin Ultrabooks these drives are as small as possible.
Unlike regular SSDs that resemble the look of HDDs, NGFF/M.2 SSDs are chips soldered on a small circuit board. They don't use the SATA interface to connect to the computer, instead they connect using the much faster PCIe interface which takes away a speed bottleneck.
The Plextor NGFF/M.2 drives will become available in lengths of 60 mm and 80 mm. Like the M6 SSDs, the NAND comes from Toshiba and is of the 19 nm Toggle type. The NAND is combined with a Marvell 88SS9183 controller. The drives will become available in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB.
The combination of the PCIe interface, the Toshiba NAND and the Marvell controller is good for specified maximum sequential reads of 740 MB/s for all NGFF/M.2 drives. The 512 GB drive writes data almost twice as fast as the 128 GB drive, the latter has specified sequential writes of 330 MB/s, while the 512 GB drive can write at 640 MB/s. Random reads are specified between 95k and 105k IOPS, depending on capacity, while random writes are the same for all drives at 75k IOPS.
The M.2 series is scheduled to release in Q4 2013.
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