Once again, MSI is at the forefront of SSD technology with the new M.2 to Turbo Mini-SAS add-in card supporting next generation PCI-Express based SSDs. The add-in card will work with SSD’s such as the new Intel SSD 750 series.
The announcement means that using one of the new high-end SSD’s and the adapter, you’ll be able to get transfer speeds of up to 32GB per second. Some of the tech sites were quick to slate the MSI Z97 boards when they were released due to the fact that SATA express wasn’t implemented. MSI stated that they were choosing to focus on the M.2 as SATA express natively only runs at Gen2 X2, whilst M.2 already supported Gen 3 – 32GB per second. Personally I think this was a brilliant move by MSI and shows how much of a forward thinking company they are.
They had the following to add: “To make things worse for SATA-Express, there is already a next generation connector called SFF8639. This runs at Gen3 x4 (32 Gb/s) and there are already SSDs on the market with this connector. Intel recently launched their new 750 SSD using this connector and with support for NVME offering a new milestone in SSD speed and connectivity. Currently there are no motherboards which can connect the SFF8639 SSD’s which is why we created an M.2 to Turbo Mini-SAS connector. This is similar like the M.2 to SATA-Express add-in card we had for Z97, except that SFF8639 can run at double the speed (Gen3 x4). We will bundle this new add-in card with selected new motherboards which we will announce at Computex 2015. Our add-in card works with all Z97 & X99 motherboards with M.2. However to get the best performance we suggest to use a MSI X99 motherboard which all feature a Turbo M.2 slot running at Gen3 x4 (32 Gb/s).”
Keep an eye on this space, once we get further information from MSI regarding the adapter and boards, you’ll be the first to hear it.
