The Plextor M3 (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on April 5, 2012 3:05 AM ESTPerformance Over Time and TRIM
When Plextor sent the drive in for review, they emphazised one thing: a technology they call "True Speed". Supposedly, its job is to guarantee a high performance experience throughout the lifetime of the drive, and even when the drive is at a dirty state. As this technology is firmware related, we don't know how it differs from what others (e.g. Intel and Crucial) have done.
First, lets get the base performance by running HD Tach on a clean drive:
In a clean state, we get 383MB/s read speeds and 329MB/s write speeds. Next we ran the drive through our torture test, which consists of 20 minutes of 4KB random writes (QD=32, 100% LBA space) run on a full drive:
The M3 is still able to manage an average write speed of ~163MB/s. However, the write speed drops to as low as 50MB/s for the first LBAs, while the peak performance is still easily over 300MB/s. Plextor does noticeably better than Crucial in this regard as the performance of the m4 dropped to an average of 35MB/s. However, it should also be noted that the M3 had a higher write speed to begin with.
I wasn't ready to let Plextor go this easily. To see how the "True Speed" technology really works, I secure erased the drive, filled it with sequential data and then tripled the amount of 4KB random writes to 60 minutes:
The amplitude of the graph is a lot smaller now and there are only two small peaks, compared to the previous graph with dozens of peaks. The performance drop is significant as we are looking at 50MB/s on average regardless of the LBA. At the lowest, the performance is 35-40MB/s. That's still better than the Crucial m4, however, even with three times the random data thrown at the M4.
Next I secure erased the drive, reran our 20 minute torture test and let the drive idle for 40 minutes:
It does recover pretty well and we are looking at almost as new performance. There are a few negative peaks where the write speed drops to ~130MB/s, but on average the performance is only 25MB/s short of clean performance.
Finally I formatted the drive to see how it responds to the ATA TRIM command:
And the performance is back to brand new.
These graphs show us that if you are running an operating system with TRIM support (e.g. Windows 7), then there is absolutely no problem with the Plextor M3. If you are running an OS with no official TRIM support for the SSD (e.g. Mac OS X), then a SandForce based SSD will still be a better choice in this regard. However, what I would like to note is that our torture test reflects an extreme usage case.
Even if you are an enthusiast or professional, it's unlikely that your usage model will put the drive in a similar state as our torture test. Our torture test is continuously writing 4KB random data across the drive; in the real world there is almost always some sequential data and idle time in between. As shown in the garbage collection graph, the M3 does not need hours of idle time to restore its performance, so it should maintain its performance pretty well even under an OS with no TRIM.
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Pr101 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
Yeah, you just happened to do a review when other ssds were low in price/on sale and the Plextor was high/not on sale. I'd also use m4 prices of the ones that come with a 2.5 to 3.5 bracket for comparison. Anyway, nice review...Kristian Vättö - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
I checked the prices one week apart (updated the prices so they wouldn't be that old) and Plextor was the most expensive throughout this period. Other drives are actually more expensive now than they were a week ago. But yeah, the prices fluctuate a lot so it's fairly hard to recommend one just based on prices.SetiroN - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
For its bundle, warranty and overall performance (never at the top but in every case amongst the top drives), I'd easily consider this the best drive on the market.As much as I understand the reliability concerns, Plextor is well known for their quality control, and for them to offer 5 yrs I'm pretty sure you can feel safe about it. This is not OCZ we're talking about.
TBH I find it silly to ask for a $10 discount when competitors are offering much less in terms of warranty and bundling.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
I'm not saying that the drive is not worth the extra $10, but it can be hard for a buyer to justify the extra. There are free utilities that do the cloning job as well (although shareware is usually easier to use). I also think that most consider 3-year warranty to be 'good enough'.Especially 64GB is all about price as you're already making a compromise by getting such a small SSD.
7Enigma - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
Shockingly after dealing with 2 failed attempts at using freeware (EASEus and another program) I ended up having sucess with the Windows 7 Image backup and built in drive manager.I was going from a new laptop 500GB HDD with about 92GB on it to a 128GB Crucial M4. First thing was to reduce the size of the partition on the 500GB to less than 128. This wasn't as easy as it sounded as apparently the page file gets randomly placed on the drive. in my case it was placed at the middle of the platter and so I couldn't shrink the 500GB partition down until I first temporarily set the page file to 0MB and then repartitioned. After figuring out that little quirk and repartitioning down to under 95GB I did a recovery image onto an external HDD (this was a laptop with a single drive bay).
Then using the bootable recovery windows cd I simply swapped out the old 500GB drive for the new M4 SSD, booted with the recovery disk, pointed to the image on the external drive, and sat back and within the hour (very slow external HDD!) was back up and running perfectly.
Sure some of those other pay-for programs are probably easier to use, but this one didn't require any additional software (other than downloading Windows recovery cd), and a bit of hair-pulling to work out the quirks.
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
I've used Clonezilla quite a few times, but I wish they would add a feature to allow you to shrink a clone to a smaller drive (assuming the data will all fit). You pretty much have to do the same thing you just mentioned: eliminate the swap file and hibernate file, resize the partition to less than your target size, then clone/Rick83 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
It would be interesting to see not only power consumption measures, but also max-load efficiency values.In the "race-to-idle" scenario, that we want to see on mobile hardware, it can often be beneficial to consume a little extra power during a short time span, but then allow the entire system to idle as early as possible.
Knowing the Watts per Throughput ratio could be helpful, and allow an easier comparison of effective/actual power consumption.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
I totally agree. Power consumption during sequential/random write does not give the big picture. A fast drive with high peak power consumption may consume less power overall because it does the job faster than a slower drive with lower peak power.Ideally, I think it would be the best to measure how much power was used during our Heavy/Light test suites, that would be a more real life scenario. How to do that accurately is another question, but I'll definitely keep this in mind :-)
James5mith - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
Anyone who has been involved in computers since the time of the first CD burners knows Plextor. Their 16x10x40 CD-RW drives were the cream of the crop and highly prized. I still have one despite not having an IDE channel to plug it into. I just can't bring myself to toss it.Spawn73 - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
You´d must´ve been living in a hole to not have heard of Plextor. They're famous for their high quality CD-burners.Couldn't the reviewer Wiki the company or something before making a blanket statement about a company being unknown?