BIOSTAR today introduced the M500 line of solid-state drives in the M.2-2280 form-factor, with PCI-Express 3.0 x2 interface. These were first shown off at Computex 2018. The drives take advantage of the NVMe 1.2 protocol. Available in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB; the drives feature DDR3L DRAM caches of 256 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB, and 1 GB, respectively. Sequential performance numbers put out by the company are up to 1,700 MB/s reads, with up to 1,100 MB/s writes.

The drives pack a couple of handy innovations, beginning with the integrated metal heatspreader, which wraps around three sides of the drive. Near the end of the drive are two indicators - one is a green link/activity LED and the other is an RGB LED that indicates real-time temperature measured at the controller, with red being the hottest, green being the coolest, and yellow~amber indicating typical/normal temperature. The company didn't reveal pricing.

BIOSTAR at COMPUTEX 2018 also showcased some other bits and pieces of hardware that didn't actually focus on mining. The company's M500 Series M.2 SSD, for example, features relatively high performance (not for an NVMe drive, surely, but against a SATA SSD there's just no competition). The LED indicators are interesting additions, dynamically blinking and giving color-coded information at a glance regarding drive temperature (which may sometimes be relevant in hunting down throttling scenarios), as well as data transmission on the drive itself.