Plextor M3 Pro (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on July 1, 2012 1:45 PM ESTI think it's safe to say that the M3 Pro is one of the best SSDs we have tested, at least from a performance standpoint. Overall it comes out as essentially the fastest drive in our Heavy and Light suites (it loses to the Samsung 830 in the Heavy suite by a small margin but beats it in the Light suite; likewise, it loses to the Kingston HyperX 3K in our Light suite but beats it in the Heavy suite—both with bigger margins). The M3 Pro is a very good all-around performer, doing well in all aspects without any real Achilles' heel.
Its performance reminds me of Corsair's Performance Series Pro because they both have exceptionally good incompressible sequential write speed, but when it comes to sequential write with compressible data, their performance is average. Plextor has its own firmware team whereas Corsair uses firmware provided by Marvell, but it's possible (even likely) that Plextor's custom firmware is built upon the Marvell firmware.
Not only is the M3 Pro fast, it's also extremely power efficient. The Samsung 830 has been our recommendation, especially for Macs, pretty much since it was released but it has one downside: a relatively high power consumption under load. This isn't an issue if you have a desktop but laptop users are often concerned about their battery life. Thus Plextor's M3 Pro is a great alternative to the Samsung 830 if you want to squeeze every minute of battery life out of your laptop.
Of course, you don't get first class performance for cheap. The M3 Pro is definitely more expensive than other 2.5" SATA SSDs on average. Is the M3 Pro worth the money? As usual, that depends on the user. The Samsung 830 Series has recently been on sale quite often and I admit that it would be hard to justify paying noticeably (+$20) more for the M3 Pro. However, it should be kept in mind that Samsung only offers a 3-year warranty while all Plextor's SSDs come with 5-year warranty, so the extra two years of warranty may be worthwhile for some buyers.
I think Plextor is one of the few OEMs that actually has the chance of challenging SSD giants such as Intel, Samsung, and OCZ. Their firmware team has proven itself to be extremely talented and they definitely have the means for creating a high performance SSD—the M3 and M3 Pro are evidence of that. Plextor is also taking user satisfaction seriously. All their SSDs come with a 5-year warranty, which is something that most OEMs do not offer. Plextool is also a great start and I'm sure future updates will bring at least a few additional desired features.
Ultimately, I would like to see Plextor's regular and Pro lineups merged. I don't think it makes much sense to have two lineups with the exactly same hardware but with different firmware, particularly with the final performance difference isn't all that large. The manufacturing costs are the same, and the higher performing firmware already exists, so why not just make a single lineup with it? In the end, the performance difference between the M3 and M3 Pro is not all that great, which makes it hard to justify the price premium that the M3 Pro commands. A single lineup would allow Plextor to concentrate all of their efforts on making the firmware as good as possible, rather than worrying about handicapping the firmware in order to make the M3.
Short of taking that route, another option would be to equip the regular series (M3 in this case) with cheaper NAND (asynchronous MLC NAND for instance); that would lower the bill of materials and allow Plextor to sell the regular series for even less money, and they could still use the same core firmware without the need to worry about handicapping the cheaper models. This is essentially what OCZ has done with their Agility and Vertex series. I can't say Plextor's current product strategy doesn't work, but personally it would make more sense to focus all you have on just one series and make it as good and competitive as possible.
Either way, I'm anxious to see what Plextor can do with the new Marvell 88SS9187 controller. The M3 Pro is already dangerously fast and I can only imagine that its successor will be significantly improved, with even faster random read and write speeds. We should find out soon enough and Plextor is worthy of being placed on your short list for SSD brands.
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tjoynt - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link
OT: another +1 Internet for the Lexx reference in your name. :)plext0r - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link
You guys remember MITSUMI drives? I remember they were the most sought after for a long time. I still have a Plextor SCSI CD-RW drive sitting in my parts bin. :-)Belard - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link
Yep... but it was more than JUST about speed back in THOSE days... it was about reliability of the drive and its burns.My first optical burner was from HP, it was $600 *USED!* and each blank disc was $10 each. Since I already had a SCSI controller for my $1000 HP scanner (snif - it was bad-ass) it was easy to plug and go.
The failure rates of burns on a 166mhz Pentium was about 60%... very EXPENSIVE. Doing burns required making sure NOTHING was going on in the back ground, no internet, no screen saver. A full disc burn took about 30 minutes... and yes, the drive and discs were hot.
It was years before good IDE burners came out and they were priced at about $200. Even around 2000, it made a difference to buy a $120 SONY burner vs a $75 no-name brands some of my friends would buy. ie: my burners lasted until I upgraded, vs their drives lasting months.
Nowadays, only 3-4 companies actually make burners. They have various labels on them... all of them costs about $15~24.
And yes, optical drives are STILL important and useful.
A REAL WindowsOS DVD is better than a DL version... And this is especially true with MS-Office. A disc version allows 2-3 system installs. The online version at about the same price only installs onto the PC you download it to. When that PC dies or you upgrade... well, that Office is STUCK on that computer.
rarson - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link
Optical drives are an order of magnitude cheaper than they used to be, and for the most part, far less finicky and more reliable. If you buy decent media, you're pretty much guaranteed a perfect burn even at the highest speed setting (which is also an order of magnitude faster). Capacity has greatly increased. Heck, I was just thinking about how disappointing it is that I can't fit more data on a DVD when I realized that 12X+ Blu-Ray burners are less than a hundred bucks. That's cheaper than the first CD-R and DVD-ROM drives I owned... and they read and write over a dozen different optical formats.Forgive me if I don't wax nostalgic about "the good old days." Technologically, there is no better time than the present.
Sufo - Tuesday, July 3, 2012 - link
Hah, agreed. Add to that people reminiscing about when it was still "difficult" to build PCs. It didn't require more skill, just more patience and time. I get it, you want to feel like you're actually creating your PC, not just fitting the parts together, but honestly, that all you were ever doing. There are still great hardware challenges - if anything there are more now than ever with the lowered cost of FPGAs and other integrated circuits.I'm glad that I no longer have to take risks with my expensive PC hardware - I want it to be as trouble-free and reliable as possible and I can't wait for the day when I can look back at this current gen of hardware and laugh at how slow SSDs were.
davepermen - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
There was a time where you could not have pc's without them. Software delivery was only trough cds, os installation, again cds. music: cds.Nowadays, you can life without them. Which i do since years. And as we go more and more mobile, they will get even less "the default source to get data from".
There was a time when 650MB was considered huge, and one could store and share everything on cds. Nowadays, not really.
Windows installs much faster from usb stick.
Software typically, when fitting on cds, gets downloaded. If it doesn't, well, still dowdnloading is the way to go, as cds don't matter then anymore anyways.
So no, they are not relevant at all anymore. They where the nr1 way to distribute data at some point in history. That point is gone.
iceman98343 - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link
kristian:when are you guys going to re-review ocz vertex 4? FW 1.5 is out.
jwilliams4200 - Sunday, July 1, 2012 - link
Finally the M3P review is posted! Thanks for the review, but hopefully Anand can get reviews posted in a more timely manner in the future (I understand that Kristian had the review done weeks ago, but Anand's policies or whatever delayed the posting of it)By the way, rumor has it that the soon to be released Plextor M5S will use the same Marvell 9174 controller, but will change to IMFT ONFi flash so it will be slower than the M3P (but presumably much cheaper).
I am hoping that Plextor is working on an M5P that will use Toshiba toggle flash and the new Marvell 9187 controller, but that is just a hope on my part. I have NOT even heard a rumor whether that is true.
Kristian Vättö - Sunday, July 1, 2012 - link
M5S is no longer a rumor: http://www.plextoramericas.com/index.php/ssd/px-m5...ONFi seems likely as sequential speeds are lower (due to less bandwidth between the NAND and controller) but random speeds are slightly higher. There is no press release about the M5S so I'm not sure if the product page has just slipped or something. I'll contact Plextor and ask what's the deal and what is the difference between M3(P) and M5S. Keep your eye on Pipeline for updates ;-)
magreen - Sunday, July 1, 2012 - link
There are only two Toolbox features I ever use for my Intel SSDs: Manual TRIM, b/c I use XP and Vista, and secure erase.Plextool doesn't do manual TRIM at all. And its secure erase is almost nonexistent b/c you need an external enclosure.
That defeats the whole point of having a toolbox, in my mind.