The Plextor M3 (256GB) Review

Power Consumption

Plextor shipped us the 256GB model, which is perfect for power comparisons. 

The idle power consumption is roughly half of what the Crucial m4 and Intel SSD 320 consume, and less than half when looking at SF-2281 based SSDs like the Vertex 3 and Intel SSD 520. This time it's not just firmware related, though—it's NAND. All the drives in the above graph except the M4 and Samsung SSD 830 use synchronous NAND (ONFi 2.x). As Anand explained in our OCZ Agility 3 review, synchronous NAND is tied to a clock signal. That signal is continuous and hence it constantly uses power, leading to a higher idle power consumption. Toggle-Mode NAND has no active clock signal and hence its DQS signal only uses power during read and write operarions.

For read and write loads, the Plextor M3 appears similar to Intel as they consume more power during sequential write than random write. That's good news because most I/O operations are at least moderately random, so focusing on low random I/O power consumption should result in lower overall power consumption. It's all up to one's workload, of course.