As far as we can tell, SSDs are going to get a whole lot faster over the next six months, with drives powered by Intel, SandForce and other controllers set to blow past the limits of SATA 3Gbps.
Plextor is the latest company to announce a set of super-speedy drives with its second generation M2S series. The 2.5in drives will ship in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities and boast impressive performance of up to 480MB/s and 330MB/s for sequential reads and writes.
Unfortunately this is the best case scenario with the largest drive. Speeds drop to 420MB/s and 210MB/s for the 128GB model or 370MB/s and 110MB/s for the 64GB option. While those read speeds are still quite impressive, write performance leaves a bit to be desired, even by today's standards.
Regardless, it's still more than SATA 3Gbps can handle, so the drives each support SATA 6Gbps, giving them plenty of headroom. They also feature '128GB DDR3 cache' - we assume they mean 128MB - dynamic wear-levelling and TRIM support under Windows 7, and ship with a 3 year on-site warranty and a copy of Acronis True Image.
Unfortunately, the press release doesn't go into any detail on the controller or memory used in the M2S drives. However, based on the speeds we'd be inclined to guess that the Marvel 9174 controller - which is also found in Corsair's new P3 SSDs - will be doing all of the heavy lifting.
Plextor's new drives are expected to land sometime next month in the UK, although there are no details on pricing yet.
