Lite-On Announces New NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD

Lite-On announced the EP1 Series M.2 PCIEe Gen2 x4 solid state drive roughly nine months ago and it has become a popular drive for cloud operators due to its great performance, small footprint, and low power consumption. Not resting on that, Lite-On is ready with the brand new EP2 M.2 solid state drive with NVMe protocol and it will be presented at the Flash Memory Summit 2015 in Santa Clara next week.

The NVMe protocol is amazing and we’ve seen what great performance it can bring when we reviewed the Intel 750 SSD and that is thanks to the way it works and with Lite-On’s customized firmware, commands are bypassed and subsequently result in improvement for multiple queues and higher queue depths while the CPU is used to its full potential instead of bottlenecking the IOPS with single core limitations.

The new EP2 series delivers a great performance with up to 250K IOPS at reading operations and 25K IOPS at writing. The ultra-low latencies of 35/35 μs ensure the fastest response times for the commands. Feature wise, the drive comes with all the basics as well as power loss protection (PLP) and end-to-end data protection. That is sadly about the only information that we get so far, but that will change next week.

“Lite-On storage takes pride in quality, innovation, and performance for all of our storage products. I’m happy to announce our next generation EP series SSD. The EP series utilizes the latest NVMe protocol, which is combined with our proprietary firmware. This removes the bottleneck on SATA hardware and creates at least 1.4x throughput improvements for all workloads. We are committed in continuing to bring innovative products to meet today’s storage demands and stay competitive in the growing market,” said Darlo Perez, Managing Director of Lite-On Americas region.

Lite-On will also bring its new ER1 and EM1 SATA SSDs along to the Flash summit. These drives are designed to address the capacity and performance needs of hyper scale computing and virtualized data centers that require rigorous I/O operations. Both the ER1 and EM1 double the maximum capacity and will be presented with up to 4TB capacity. The ER1 and EM1 come in two form factors, 1.8-inch and the more default 2.5-inch size.