Over the past few years, we've seen two tiers of solid-state drives (SSDs) emerge—conventional drives that utilize the SATA protocol, and a more expensive set of products that rely on PCI Express (PCIe) cards. The PCIe models are often faster than standard SATA-based drive; the PCIe bus they rely on is a faster link for storage communication. The Plextor M6e PX-AG256M6e (256GB) ($300) is one of the first PCIe-based SSDs we've seen that seeks to bridge that gap, offering high-end, PCIe-based performance at an everyday enthusiast price.

Whether the M6e is attractive to you will depend on whether you're willing to pay a premium for its PCIe interface. The drive is markedly smaller in capacity than most of the other modern SATA drives (256GB, versus 512GB or more for other SATA drives in this price category), but attempts to compensate with the best performance you can buy in a sub-$500 PCIe part.