Computex 2016 saw quite the number of new SSD announcements. For brevity, I’ll skip the 2.5″ SATA drives and focus on M.2, U.2, etc. since they’re the future of SFF storage from a performance and space-savings perspective.
M.2
ADATA – 2TB NVME M.2 and enterprise drives
Crucial – NVME Ballistix TX3 and 2TB MX300
Plextor – M8PeG (first M.2 drive to come with a heatsink, pictured above) and EP2-series
PNY – PhantomX Phison-based NVME SSD
OCZ – Revodrive RD400 (this one’s actually released now)
PCIe card
Plextor – M8PeG (with heatsink and LEDs) and EP2-series
U.2
ADATA – Enterprise and 2TB consumer drives
SATA Express
Other
Samsung – 512GB NVMe SSD on a chip
Overall I’m really pleased with the plethora of upcoming M.2 drives in both budget-oriented AHCI and performance-focused NVMe flavors. 2.5″ SATA drives are bottle-necked in max speed by the SATA 3.0 interface and the form factor is unnecessarily large considering how small the PCBs inside has gotten in recent years due to shrinking manufacturing processes. M.2 drives can alleviate both those issues and they also eliminate the need for any cables to boot, it’s perfect for SFF builds.
Thoughts? Did we miss a drive? Let us know in the forum here.
