The Plextor M3 (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on April 5, 2012 3:05 AM ESTPower 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.
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Kristian Vättö - Sunday, April 8, 2012 - link
Then the thanks should go to the man himself, aka Anand :-)wvh - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
We're not criticising him, just teaching him the smell of old farts.tnicks - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
Yep. I remember getting one of the first 2x burners back in the day from Plextor for ~$450 dollars. I still have nightmares of buffer underrun errors turning my $10/ea dollar blank cds into coasters.The0ne - Thursday, April 12, 2012 - link
Yep. Their products back then were high quality but came at a cost. To give an example, I tested and qualify Plextor CD/DVD drives for use in our system entirely despite the cost. That's how good and reliable they were.I am, however, shocked that the review started off about not knowing about the company though. Plextor has been around for ages with good products, although their presence has been little here in the US. I imagine most that don't know about the company would be young in age, very young.
Impulses - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
Will you guys be keeping this drive in a production system to see how it does long term?Kristian Vättö - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
I'm using it as a boot drive in my main system at the moment. So far so good.ac2 - Friday, April 6, 2012 - link
Kristian, you say correctly say "64GB and 128GB capacities are often the most popular capacities right now"And yet AT continues to persist with reviews of 200GB and up drives in almost all instances... It may be what the manufacturers are sending you but we expect better...
iwod - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
I thought there is a New Marvell controller coming out soon?Kristian Vättö - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
Marvell announced the 88SS9187 a couple of weeks ago but it will take a while before manufacturers release SSD based on it.bji - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
Marvell is right across the street from me. Well, across the highway anyway. When I ride my bike to work I go through their campus.A year or two ago I was thinking how exciting the SSD controller concept was; I thought that there must be lots of neat algorithmic tricks that can be played to hide the performance issues with block-erase flash memory and it sounded like a very intruiging problem to work on.
Too bad I didn't realize that Marvell would be working on SSD controllers (although I suspected they might). I should have popped across the highway and seen if I could get a job ... although, being a software developer with little experience in embedded controllers, it's unlikely they would have been interested.