Plextor, a name that some of our older readers may remember from the days of optical drives, entered the solid state drive market nearly six years ago with a pair of 2.5-inch SATA II drives. The Taiwanese company continued to refine its SSD offerings over the next several years and was among the first to release a PCIe-based drive, last year's M6e (technically, it was an M.2 drive attached to a PCIe adapter but I digress).
A successor to that drive - the aptly-named Plextor M7e - was slated to arrive by the end of the year but was ultimately discontinued before it ever hit the market. Rumors suggested the drive simply wasn't fast enough to compete with other offerings so the company went back to the drawing board and came up with the failed successor's successor.
PCWorld claims the new M8Pe will utilize a 4x PCIe 3.0 connection and the NVMe protocol to deliver 4KB random read IOPS of 270,000 and 4KB writes of up to 150,000 IOPS.
Unfortunately, Plextor hasn't yet revealed read / write specifications nor do we know what capacities will be offered and for how much money. The company has said, however, that it'll utilize a couple of handy features including PlexTurbo RAM caching and PlexVault. The former is a compression technology that's said to maximize storage capacity while the latter allows users to hide private data on a shared computer.
The Plextor M8Pe SSD is expected to make its official debut at CES next week. Be sure to check back early and often as we'll have a team on the ground in Las Vegas covering the trade show.