More than a decade has passed since PATA (Parallel ATA) was made superfluous by SATA. Originally designed to provide a maximum throughput of 16MB/s, PATA and was at length upgraded to 133MB/s, which may still appear like plenty when you consider today's desktop local field networks are still limited to ~100MB/s using Gigabit Ethernet.

And at the time, 133MB/s was plenty. No devices could achieve that kind of throughput for a few reasons. First, PATA used the PCI bus which was shared with many other devices, all of which were competitive for bandwidth. This congestion connected the host bus limited the maximum burst remove rate and No fractious drives could sustain transfer rates of above 80MB/s -- even away 2005.

Withal, as early as 2003 desktops were pumping 3GB/s of bandwidth 'tween their scheme memory and processor, patc graphics cards were extraordinary 30GB/s. It became clear that hard drives were the weakest link of modern computers and that if PCs were going to get faster, the biggest hike would come from rethinking primary memory board.

In turn, companies dumped the nonintersecting design for a serial interface, SATA, and away 2010 we saw 10,000 Revolutions per minute hard drives reach 130MB/s of sustained data transfer, a little over 60% many than what was seen previously using PATA. Unluckily, while they were faster, those high-velocity hard drives were also hotter, noisier, pricier and less capacious than slower spindle drives.

Still unable to max the original SATA port, conventional tricky drives had little hope of tapping SATA 2.0's 300MB/s allowance, much less SATA 3.0's 600MB/s, even those speeds have already grown inadequate for the fastest flash drives. This brings us to SATA 3.2 and its ample 16Gb/s bandwidth, which is offered via SATA Fast and SATA M.2 connected Intel's newborn 9-serial chipsets.

SATA M.2 is particularly interesting with drives similar to mSATA SSDs, which were introduced with SATA 3.1, except that M.2 supports high speeds. In the case of Asrock and its Ultra M.2 socket, which is related to at once to the CPU, we'Re talking about a bandwidth of up to 32Gb/s, while the standard M.2 socket still provides 10Gb/s. Now we sportsmanlike need faster flash drives.

Following up on its M1 and M2 series, Plextor's new M6 range puts custom firmware, Toshiba NAND gaudy remembering and a Marvell control in three different packages:

  • A day-after-day 2.5" SATA ram -- the M6S
  • An mSATA drive -- the M6M
  • And a PCI Limited/M.2 version -- the M6e, that includes a 512GB model with read and write speeds of up to 700MB/s and 580MB/s.