 The CM Storm SF17 uses a massive 18 centimeter fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four port USB hub. Click now to learn more. This video ended up being less about the Plexter M6E SSD specifically and more to do with what it represents in general. Finally, a move away from the long time bottleneck that is the SATA interface and towards PCI Express for system storage. But with a bit of a twist this time. Unlike previous kludgy solutions like the OCZ Revo drive which used a RAID controller as a middleman between the PCI Express controller on your CPU or motherboard and the SATA controllers on multiple drives that were soldered onto a PCB, something that caused long boot times, no support for the trim command and poor compatibility aside from being something you could set up just as easily yourself, this new approach uses native PCI Express all the way through to the controller on your drive. Elegant, eh? Well, okay, so this product doesn't look particularly elegant, but don't worry. This PCI Express card that the daughter board sits on is basically nothing more than a dumb interconnect between your PCI Express slot and the M.2 interface SSD that's sitting on it here. Electrically, it's just a straight pass through, so elegance isn't always about looks, am I right? Before we get into the M60 specifically though, it's probable that you've never actually seen an M.2 drive before, so let's do a quick WTF is that session here. This interface on this motherboard here might look pretty much like an M SATA or mini PCI Express slot, but it's actually much more badass than that. It gives whatever is plugged into it access to up to four PCIe Gen 3 lanes, a SATA 3 6 gigabit port and even USB. The card side of the interface is designed from the ground up for the best possible ratio of features to physical space, making it a great way to get desktop grade performance on ultrabooks and other small, thin and light devices. Cards can be designed in a number of length and widths, with most of them 22 millimeters wide, just wide enough for a flash chip, and they can tap into whatever combination of connectivity they need, including PCI Express SATA and SATA Express, which is basically A H C I commands over a PCI Express bus using the new 3.2 standard. You'll be able to tell what your card needs by the keying on the bottom of the connector, which leads us pretty well into the M6E. It uses two PCI Express Gen 2 lanes for a theoretical max throughput of 1000 megabytes per second or about 60% more than SATA 3 6 gigabit. It's 80 millimeters long and 22 millimeters wide with eight of Toshiba's 19 nanometer toggle NAND flash chips and a Marvel 9183 native PCI Express controller that uses A H C I commands instead of N B M E to offer improved compatibility and driverless operation at the cost of some performance, particularly in random workloads. Now, while Plexter's product page laughably declares it to be the first SSD optimized for gamers, the speed of this drive with their custom firmware is pretty impressive. The 256 gig model that we have here can handle sequential write speeds of around 580 megabytes per second and sequential reads of around 770 megabytes per second, well over the maximum of SATA 3, with random reads and writes both rated at around 100,000 IOPS. Now, beyond that, Plexter does include some extra technologies, including native UEFI boot support for faster drive initialization and boot times on UEFI motherboards, as well as their usual true speed garbage collection algorithm that helps it maintain its performance over time and a five year warranty to go along with the claims about, you know, outstanding reliability that they make. Now, speaking of those claims, Plexter takes an interesting approach here. While another manufacturer, a very reputable one I might add, asked me not to talk about their use of Flexstar SSD testing chambers, Plexter wears this right on their sleeve and calls out their driver reliability testing standards right on the product page. And it's for this reason that the LinusTechTips.com forum uses a Plexter SSD as its boot drive. There are only a handful of SSD makers that I would trust in such a deployment. So there you have it. While the M6C is very expensive, features a Frankenstein-like implementation, and in the real world, due to Microsoft's poor native Windows 8 AHCI driver and some other early adopter struggles, doesn't really perform better than a normal SSD, it is the first native PCI Express SSD I've had the pleasure of laying my hands on, and I'm excited for the future of this new technology. Speaking of being excited for the future, summer is finally heating up. Now, you may have noticed my eyewear changing throughout the video today. I'm actually just going to bring this up here. And that is all thanks to our new sponsor, Warby Parker, and the unusual way that they let their customers shop for eyewear. Their free home try-on program lets you shop their online portfolio of prescription glasses and sunglasses, pick out five frames you like, try them on in the comfort of your own home, blast them out to your friends for opinions or whatever else, then box them back up and send them back with the included shipping box and included shipping label free of charge. Warby Parker will then send you a brand new one of the one that you picked for the enjoyment of you and everyone else around you. The best part for me is that the extras are included, so there's no high-pressure upsell. Anti-glare coated prescription glasses and polarized non-prescription sunglasses start at 95 bucks, with prescription sunglasses starting at $150. So you can actually get a few pairs of fashionable, well-constructed glasses for less than what you'd normally pay for one from a similar quality boutique brand. On top of that, they ship a pair of glasses to someone in need for every pair that they sell to a customer. So visit warbyparker.com slash linus to check out their new Spectrum Sun collection, and as an added bonus, if you use that URL when you do your try-on, you'll get free three-day shipping on your final selection. So thanks Warby Parker for supporting Linus Tech Tips, and thanks to you the viewer for watching. Without both of you, then this whole thing wouldn't work and we couldn't make videos, so way to go, all of you. As usual guys, the link to pricing and availability for the Plexter M6E is in the video description below the like, dislike, and share buttons, which you should use accordingly. Also in the video description is a support link where you can buy a t-shirt, give us a monthly contribution, or change your Amazon bookmarks so that we get an affiliate kickback whenever you buy stuff. It helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more videos like this one. Like, SSDs. Motherboards. Sunglasses. You can put these back on. These studio lights are actually surprisingly bright. It's much better.