Power Consumption

Drive Power Consumption—Idle

Idle power consumption is a little higher than the M3 and Corsair Performance Pro, but still much better than what most other drives offer.

Drive Power Consumption—Sequential Write

Power consumption during sequential writes, on the other hand, is noticeably lower than the M3. Here the M3 Pro is on-par with Corsair's Performance Series Pro.

Drive Power Consumption—Random Write

Random write power consumption follows the sequential write pattern—the M3 Pro is again more efficient than the M3 and almost equivalent to Performance Pro.

I would like to note that the power used during I/O actions is only one aspect of total power consumption. If you have a fast drive, it will obviously complete I/O tasks quicker (some might be familiar with the term "race to idle") and hence spend less time writing/reading and more time idling. In terms of laptop battery life, idle power consumption is the most important aspect, although it does depend on one's workload. We are working on improving our power consumption tests in order to make them more real world relevant, but at least for now it looks like the Plextor M3 and M3 Pro should do quite well in a laptop.

Performance Over Time and TRIM Final Words
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  • NCM - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link

    Three things I forgot to include in my post above:
    - The Plextor needs to be reformatted for the Mac. You use Apple's Disk Utility to handle that, as with any other drive.
    - Cloning the original drive using DU's Restore function will also automatically clone Lion's hidden Recovery partition.
    - Absolute SSD performance is limited by my 2010 MBP's 3 Gb/s SATA interface, so I could have bought a cheaper last generation drive. However I hope to be keeping this pricey SSD long enough for it to see at least one more host computer, and that will support faster transfers.
  • Belard - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link

    Pretty much ALL new SSDs are SATA3.0 / 6GB/s... so its not really an issue.

    Its older tech or mix tech models that are SATA2.
  • Kristian Vättö - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link

    Not with the regular updater at least. In theory, someone could modify the installer and make it possible though.
  • Kyanzes - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link

    "relatively unknown brand" :)

    Okay.
  • bobsmith1492 - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link

    Yes they are relatively unknown. Yes they used to be more well-known but only for optical drives.
  • eanazag - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link

    I would like to see a 2.5" HDD at 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm sample data for a baseline included in the reviews. I don't care if they ever get updated after that. I would just like to be able to quickly see where the mechanical drives chime in.

    Performance would data would be icing, but power data is nice.

    If I upgrade my users to a drive off this list, which is very likely. I'd like to be able to tell them if they are going to take a hit on battery life or a boost.
  • Belard - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link

    They stopped doing that some time ago because it messes up the charts somewhat. Basically, they just don't compare... and that was before the SATA 6Gbps drives came out.

    Here is a early 2011 review with a WD VelociRaptor (The fastest HD money can buy for a consumer drive). And yet, its a sliver. Only SSDs that perform almost as slow are the bottom end SSD. And keep in mind, the Raptors are 2-3 times faster than a 5400RPM drive.
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4346/ocz-agility-3-2...

    RANDOM READ (MB/s)
    00.68 = Raptor
    58.10 = Intel X25-M G2 (still a very good drive)
    93.50 = Crucial C300 (early 6Gbps drives)

    Sequential READ (MB/s)
    145.30 = Raptor
    226.30 = Intel X25-M G2 (still a very good drive)
    307.20 = Crucial C300 (early 6Gbps drives)
    392.20 = Intel 510 SSD (6Gbps)

    A modern high end SSD is about 100x faster in random R / W operations over any HD.

    Oh, here is a GOOD older 2010 review which includes a Seagate 5400 RPM 2.5" drive. OUCH!
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/3690/the-impact-of-s...

    See how the chart becomes somewhat meaningless? And thats with 3Gbps drives!

    Imagine looking at a chart comparing a 16mhz 286 to a quad core 3400mhz i5 CPU.
  • hechacker1 - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link

    Probably, assuming there isn't some checksum that can't be cracked to flash the drive.

    In my experience, almost all drive firmwares can be flashed.
  • sulu1977 - Monday, July 2, 2012 - link

    Speed and performance of such a device is important, but not as important as reliability. Reliability is hands down my top priority. Just wanted to mention this.
  • octoploid - Tuesday, July 3, 2012 - link

    There is already an unofficial tool available that can transform a normal M3 into an M3-Pro:
    http://bbs.pceva.com.cn/thread-47279-1-1.html

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