Gigabyte recently announced a new series of M.2 form factor PCI-E NVMe solid state drives. Following the company’s Ultra Durable technology and testing methodologies, the new Gigabyte M.2 SSDs come in three capacities at 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB in a M.2 2280 package.

The new M.2 SSDs feature a PCI-E 3.0 x2 interface and support for NVMe 1.3 as well as Host Memory Buffer technology that allows for system RAM to be used as the drive’s cache in lieu of on-board DRAM. The 128GB and 256GB models are official today, and the 512GB model is reportedly coming soon. Gigabyte has not yet released specifications on the top capacity drive, but performance information on the two lower capacity drives is available on its website. The Gigabyte M.2 128GB SSD is rated at up to 1100 MB/s sequential reads, 500 MB/s sequential writes, 90K random read IOPS, and 100K random write IOPS. The mid-tier 256GB capacity SSD steps things up a bit to 1200 MB/s sequential reads, 800 MB/s sequential writes, 80K random read IOPS, and 150K random write IOPS. It seems to take a hit on the random reads, but the random write performance is much better, at least on paper. I am curious what the 512GB SSD will offer in terms of performance.

The new M.2 drives come with three-year warranties and 1.5 million hours MTBF ratings. The 128GB is limited (under warranty) to 100 TBW and the 256GB drive rated at 200 TBW. The drives will reportedly be available soon though I was not able to find online listings or pricing at the time of writing.