Following its early-CES launch, we have more details of Toshiba's "entry-level" M.2 NVMe SSD, the RC100. This drive is designed to offer significantly higher performance than SATA SSDs, at a tiny (10-15 percent) price premium over the fastest SATA SSDs. This market has been made inroads to by companies like ADATA, with their XPG SX6000-series. The RC100, offers not only NVMe performance, but also a more compact size. The drive is built in the M.2-2242 form-factor (42 mm long). It will fit on any motherboard that supports M.2-2280 drives, you just have to move the fastening nut to an inner hole marked "42."

Toshiba RC100 drives combine an in-house developed controller with Toshiba 64-layer BiCS Flash TLC memory. The drive features PCI-Express 3.0 x2 host interface, and takes advantage of the NVMe 1.2 protocol. It offers sequential transfer rates of up to 1,620 MB/s reads, with up to 1,130 MB/s writes; and 4K random access performance of up to 160,000 IOPS reads, and 120,000 IOPS writes. The drive comes in capacities of 120 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB, and is backed by a 3-year warranty.