The Plextor M3 (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on April 5, 2012 3:05 AM ESTFinal Words
Let's be frank: I'm surprised. When I first got the Plextor M3, I wasn't expecting much from it. A Marvell based SSD from a smaller, somewhat unknown SSD brand is not too promising. If this had been a SandForce based SSD, then we all know what the performance would be like since all OEMs except Intel use the stock firmware. However, Marvell's controllers require a lot more work as the stock firmware that Marvell provides is in need of work. Having your own firmware team is a must if you plan on competing anywhere other than the low-end market. That requires capital, which can be an obstacle for a small firm. With Plextor being a subsidiary of a massive company, they should have the capital they need, and judging by the peformance results, they do.
The Plextor M3 isn't the fastest drive we have tested, but it comes in very close in many tests. It's clearly the fastest Marvell based SSD and it beats its Marvell siblings quite handily in most metrics. SandForce has been and still is extremely fast, but what Plextor has shown is that Marvell's controllers can keep up with SandForce when equipped with great firmware.
I've only really got two complaints. The first one is Plextor's pricing. I think Plextor may be pricing themselves out of competition in the smaller capacities. While the price difference with other brands in 64GB and 128GB capacities is only about $15 on average, that's quite a lot when put into perspective. In percentages, the 64GB M3 is 16% and the 128GB M3 is 9% more expensive than the other drives on average. If you could save 10% on each component in a new system, most people will opt for pricing over brand name.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (4/2/2012) | ||||
| 64GB | 128GB | 256GB | 512GB | |
| Plextor M3 | $110 | $180 | $340 | $660 |
| Crucial m4 | $88 | $155 | $315 | $630 |
| Intel 520 Series | $110 | $180 | $345 | $800 |
| Samsung 830 Series | $105 | $185 | $300 | $780 |
| OCZ Vertex 3 | $90 | $178 | $340 | $770 |
In my opinion, the M3 would be a lot more attractive if Plextor lowered the prices of 64GB and 128GB models by even $10. 64GB and 128GB capacities are often the most popular capacities right now (as spending $300+ on a single SSD is quite rare), so if you want to be competitive, that's the niche you should focus in. Plextor could even increase the pricing on their higher capacity drives while still remaining competitive. Then again, perhaps Plextor is hoping to skip directly to the more lucrative 256GB and 512GB market, as the lower capacity market is already quite cutthroat.
My second complaint is that reviewing the M3 made me lust for something better, and it's called the M3 Pro. The controller is the same Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2 but Plextor has taken the firmware one step further and this has resulted in better performance. I'm not going to go into detail about the M3 Pro here, but it reportedly provides up to 540MB/s read and 450MB/s write speeds along with random read of 75K IOPS and 69K IOPS random write. Hopefully we will be able to get our hands on a review sample soon.
Overall, Plextor M3 is a good performer - and we didn't notice any issues during our testing. It's fast in every aspect, has good gargabe collection, and isn't too power hungry. There is one big unknown though: Reliability. Current generation Marvell based SSDs in general have been fairly reliable, especially when put against SandForce, but firmware plays such a big role with the Marvell controller that you can't really know for sure.
Compatibility and reliability can take months to months to truly understand, so as always proceed with caution. There are great, known good solutions on the market at competitive prices already so there's no need to take a risk on an SSD before its reliability has been proven.
In any case, it's good to see that Marvell's controller still has legs.
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magnetar - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link
... that the Intel 510 SSD also uses the Marvell 9174 controller. I'm pleased that the 510 is still included in many SSD reviews at AnandTech, although it is dismissed as old and slow by some enthusiasts.The Samsung SSD Magician is the "gold standard" of SSD support programs? Personally I prefer Intel's SSD Toobox, the 3.0 version of course. I use both, and they are excellent, I've never had a problem with either of them. I like Intel's Toolbox UI over Samsung's Magician, the latter running in the background when not in use for some reason. Magician has more functions than the Toolbox, so has it beat in that aspect. Both allow firmware updates in the Windows environment... priceless!
LokutusofBorg - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link
Yeah, I noticed this too. That part of the article should be updated to say "Intel's 510 and 520 series..." or some such.sunsin - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link
Kristian, I compared the result with Intel SSD 520Intel SSD 520 240GB Clean 284.5 MB/s After Torture 162.9 MB/s After TRIM 162.9 MB/s
Plextor M3 256GB Clearn 328 MB/s After Torture 302.1 MB/s After TRIM: 327.1 MB/s
The Plextor M3 has way better performance than Sandforce based SSD where the TRIM will never restore the clean performance. This does mean that Plextor will be better option for long term use.
In addition, you mentioned that Sandorce based SSD will be a better choice for OS without official TRIM support, please provide some comparative figure to support this. The After Torture performance for Plextor vs Sandforce can be 302.1 vs 162.9 MBs. The win by 80%. Please explain why you always suggest Sandforce based SSD For OS without TRIM?
Kristian Vättö - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link
First off, we use different methods for TRIM testing on SF and non-SF drives. Non-SF drives are filled and tortured with compressible data as that is what HD Tach uses. SF drives, on the other hand, are filled and tortured with incompressible data and then benchmarked with AS-SSD which uses incompressible data as well. The length of the torture can vary as well. Hence you can't directly compare the results.In the case of Intel 520 and Plextor M3, Intel 520 was tortured for 60 minutes and it still managed a speed of 162.9MB/s. The numbers you have for Plextor are after 20 min torture. I also included a graph of 60min torture and the average write speed dropped to 54.9MB/s. Does this make sense to you now?
SandForce's advantage is extremely low write amplification: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph5529/44082...
When you write less, there is also less garbage collection to do. Here is one graph that Anand linked earlier which compares TRIM/GC of drives: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph5719/45462...
However, like I noted in the TRIM part, there should be absolutely no problem in running M3 in an OS without TRIM. IF you are an extreme user and you'll be constantly hammering the drive under OS with no official TRIM support, then a SandForce drive may be a better solution. Most people's workload isn't like that and any decent SSD should do the job.
I maintain a huge SSD sticky at MacRumors and I've only seen a few users complain about performance degradation, and nowadays we would consider those SSDs to be ancient anyway. Besides, if the performance degrades, you can always enable TRIM temporarily in OS X and TRIM the drive, then disable TRIM.
jwilliams4200 - Monday, April 9, 2012 - link
Note that the "Steady State 4KB Random Write Performance" graph has highly misleading results.The steady-state 4KB QD=32 random write performance of the Vertex 3 when tested with random data streams (as the industry-standard SNIA protocol specifies) is only about 30MB/s, not 159MB/s as anandtech.com's graph incorrectly shows. You can see the correct results in either of these reviews:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/m...
http://www.storagereview.com/plextor_pxm3p_ssd_rev...
It is disappointing for anandtech.com to get a simple test like this so very wrong.
kissfan003 - Saturday, April 7, 2012 - link
Plextor an unknown... Dang, I'm old... They were the best optical drive "back in my day"...ejiggyb - Sunday, April 8, 2012 - link
Plextor used to be the only one for me, way back when Adaptec software was the king. That became Roxio. I had 3 different models they all became junk after a little use. They would automatically change speed if i was ripping a CD down to 2 speed unless I held the open button for a few seconds before I put in the CD. I spent a pretty penny for all them. To bad, I was a huge fan.yyrkoon - Sunday, April 8, 2012 - link
"As far as brand awareness for Plextor, I believe the reason for their relative obscurity of late has been the lack of media awareness and contacts. Their journey to become an SSD manufacturer has been rather abnormal. When you think of the history of other SSD manufacturers, they were mostly known for RAM before entering the SSD world."While I wont argue that Plextor is/is not in the RAM business. Since when in the context of this article has Plextor been known for it's RAM products ? The general audience here being computer enthusiasts, and not Electronic Engineers. Even then, being in embedded design myself ( as a very serious hobby ) I can not say with all honesty that I have even heard of a Plextor memory chip/stick.
I think most/all power users that have been around over the last 10+ years would agree that Plextor is most noted for it's optical drives. Specifically the bit for bit copy models. Like another reader, I own a UW SCSI UltraPlex myself, and it is still going strong to this day. Though admittedly, it has not been very useful for years.
Kristian Vättö - Sunday, April 8, 2012 - link
I was specifically talking about other SSD manufacturers. Think e.g. OCZ and Crucial, both are RAM manufacturers. Plextor's journey is abnormal because they never made RAM or other components, only ODDs. I was not claiming that Plextor is a RAM manufacturer.yyrkoon - Sunday, April 8, 2012 - link
Ah ha. I see now. *Other* SSD manufactures . . My mistake.. Sorry.So looking at things from that perspective.
Plextor started off as the go to brand for many people where optical drives were concerned. Their CD writers / readers were second to none.. Often far exceeding the competition in performance, and features.
Now days, like anyone else. It seems Plextor is only interested in making throw-away ( reference design ) products. No more pride in the brand.
Going by the information given to us in your review, it seems perhaps Plextor is trying to put effort into at least this product, With great results ( so it seems ). Perhaps even trying to regain their good name of the past,
With the above said, I think I would have to give Plextor a pass. Simply because their recent track record says one thing to me( by recent i mean the last several years ). *Money*. Not the end user, not even their good reputation. That goes back to your comments about the cost as well.
Happily, I would love to be proven wrong. However, I would not hold my breathe passed 6 months where software support is concerned.
Thank you for your non condescending response Though, I probably deserved it heh.