Stefan Mileschin

ADATA revealed its flagship consumer SSD in the M.2 form-factor, the SR1020NP series, which is an evolution of the AXNP280e it unveiled at this year's International CES. The drive comes in capacities of up to 1 TB, is based on LSI-SandForce 3700 series processor wired to MLC NAND flash, and a host interface with wiring for PCI-Express 2.0 x4 physical layer. Most M.2 SSDs, in contrast, are being designed for PCI-Express 2.0 x2.

That's not all, most motherboards launched on Intel's 9-series chipset feature M.2 slots with just PCI-Express 2.0 x2 wiring, with the exception of ASRock's top-end Z97-Extreme6, which features a special M.2 slot with PCI-Express 2.0 x4 wiring. Using that slot, however, will eat into the bandwidth meant for graphics cards, and the primary PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot will run at 3.0 x8, because ASRock wired the slot to the CPU's root complex. Under ideal conditions, SandForce 3700 series processors are advertised to offer sequential transfer rates as high as 1.8 GB/s. Given that, this drive should be bottlenecked on most motherboards with PCI-Express 2.0 x2 based M.2 slots. ADATA will display the drive at the 2014 Computex, early next month, alongside gaming-grade and overclocker-grade DDR4 modules.

http://www.techpowerup.com/201004/ad...-pictured.html