Plextor is an IT company specializing in the manufacture of optical drives and hard drives. She has collaborated closely with Marvell Technology Group in recent years, which is also a company specializing in readers. Plextor has therefore become very close to Marvell's controller ecosystem since its proprietary firmware technology is based on Marvell's controllers. Recently, the company has struggled to compete in the market because the Marvell 88SS1093 controller is a few years old. In order to mark its return to the market, Plextor is preparing a fairly impressive disk system: a rotating disk with four M9Pe M.2 SSD modules mounted in RAID 0 mode: the quad M9Pe 1 TB SSD.
Recall that M9Pe M.2 SSD is an SSD that operates a Marvell 88SS1093 controller, Toshiba TLC 3D flash memory and can achieve sequential read, 3200 MB / s and 2100 MB / s sequential write. Plextor demonstrated the prototype of its new technology at Computex (a computer and high-tech fair that is held annually at the Taipei World Trade Center in Taipei, Taiwan). This disk is based on the Marvell 88NR2241 PCIe switch which has 8 PCIe 3.0 interfaces on one side and 4 PCIe 3.0 interfaces on the other side. It can support up to four PCIe 3.0 / NVMe drives without the need to fork PCIe channels by CPU / PCH. This maximizes compatibility with consumer platforms that have a limited number of PCIe lanes.
According to Plextor figures, the quad M9Pe 1 TB SSD can reach 6500 MB / s in sequential write speed and 5000 MB / s in sequential read speed. This is far beyond the speeds of currently available drives. For better reliability, its backplane will also support RAID 1 (mirror) mode in addition to RAID 0 (tape) mode. Plextor is still working on its disk system and is not planning on launching until the end of 2018. Other manufacturers like ASUS, ASRock, HP, etc. also offer similar solutions to the Plextor backplane but they are without PCIe switches.
