Plextor 512GB M6e

PCI-Express (PCIe) interface. Fastest single solid-state drive (SSD) we've tested. Five-year warranty.

Expensive. Needs to be placed well away from high-heat sources, like GPUs, in chassis.

The Plextor M6e PX-AG256M6e (256GB) makes the most sense for customers who either don't have enough SATA ports to mount another drive, or who want a single-drive solution that uses more robust NAND with significantly better performance than current...

PCI-E storage is still relatively new and there are few options on the market, so elevated costs are to be expected. Compared to the standard M6e standalone M.2 drive and expansion card, the M6e Black Edition is not a terrible deal. You get a much...

Marvell controller is equally good with incompressible and compressible data.

twice the price of high grade 250GB SATA 3 drives.

Speedy data transfer rates, in excess of the best SATA SSDs ; Striking black-and-red look ; Free RAM-caching software

Expensive, on a per-gigabyte basis ; PCIe x4 drives are coming this year

The original M6e was one of our favorite PC upgrades of 2014. It allowed a user with the PCI Express slots and lanes available to get, in a single drive, speed potential that would otherwise require several SATA SSDs in a RAID arrangement. None of that...

The first thing we need to note about the M6e Black Edition is how it affects existing M6 series owners, especially those who have the original M6e. Basically, at the drive level this is the same product. Same speeds, same features (including support...

Outperformed current 2.5-inch or M.2 SATA SSDs ; Enables an M.2 desktop upgrade without an M.2 slot ; Five-year warranty ; Much cheaper than other PCI Express-card SSDs, such as OCZ’s RevoDrive line

Still a premium cost per gigabyte ; No file-transfer software ; No 1TB version

Just before this drive, we reviewed the bare-drive version of the M6e M.2—the one without the PCI Express bridge card—and found it topped all of the internal 2.5-inch SATA SSDs we’ve tested to date. The M6e M.2 PCIe performed the same, but it garners...