One of the biggest announcements to come out of CES so far is Plextor's new M7e PCIe SSD. While the press release was a bit short on details, the drive was on display in Plextor's suite at the ARIA Resort and Casino. Looking at the images below, you can see that, like the M6e, the new M7e is designed to fit in a motherboard's M.2 PCIe slot. At this time, its unknown whether or not the drive will be available with a half-height, half-length (HHHL) adapter.
Visitors to Plextor's suite are able to view live demos of the M7e and compare its performance to SSDs from other manufacturers. The image below shows how the M7e (on the left) compares to a drive from Samsung (on the right). With sequential read and write speeds in excess of 1000 MB/s, the M7e is more than twice as fast as your average SATA SSD.
The M7e is powered by Marvell's new 88SS9293 controller. This is the same 4-lane PCIe SSD controller found in Kingston's new HyperX Predator PCIe SSD. As with Plextor's previous SSDs, the NAND flash is manufactured by Toshiba. There also appears to be a row of capacitors which would more than likely be used to flush data to NAND in the event of a power failure.
