Plextor M3 Pro (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on July 1, 2012 1:45 PM ESTPerformance Over Time and TRIM
The M3 Pro is also equipped with Plextor's "True Speed" technology, which we found to be fairly effective when testing the M3. Hence we should expect the M3 Pro to do well in this aspect as well. To get the base-level performance, I ran HD Tach once on a clean drive:
The first step in our torture testing is 20 minutes of 4KB random writes (QD=32, 100% LBA space) ran on a full drive:
As with the M3, 20 minutes of torturing is nowhere enough to put the M3 Pro at its worst state. The average write performance is still 156MB/s, although it does drop to as low as 70-80MB/s for some LBAs.
Next I secure erased the drive and ran our torture test for 60 minutes:
And that's more like it. Average performance has dropped to 45MB/s and there are only three +100MB/s peaks. This was expected as the M3 experienced similar behavior.
I let the drive idle for an hour and 40 minutes after 60 minutes of torture and a single pass of HD Tach, and here's what the performance looked like:
Performance does recover pretty nicely with some idle time and sequential writes. Write speed is still nowhere near clean state performance but it has more than tripled when compared to the dirty state after 60 minutes of torturing.
Finally I TRIM'ed the drive to make sure that TRIM functions properly, and it does:
Overall the M3 Pro should be a good option, even if you're using an OS without official TRIM support (such as OS X). If you're running an OS with TRIM support, then there is obviously nothing to worry about as TRIM functions perfectly. TRIM can nowadays be enabled in OS X for third party drives as well, so there is even less to worry about. If you don't want to have TRIM enabled all the time (due to stability issues for example), you can enable it temporarily and TRIM the drive by secure erasing free space in Disk Utility. After that you can simply disable TRIM and you are left with a TRIM'ed SSD.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
55 Comments
View All Comments
etamin - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
Not sure if anyone mentioned this but the Vertex 4 (now firmware v1.4) can really use an update in both the charts (on newly reviewed SSDs) and in the SSD bench.Kristian Vättö - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
Just spoke with Anand, he promised that the updated results will be in Bench later this week. I'll also do a quick article about the results, should be up early next week or so unless something comes up (hint: I have a package coming from Plextor which needs urgent attention ;-)etamin - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
Awesome! just saw the updates in the Plextor M5S review!SSD_Privacy - Monday, July 9, 2012 - link
In the review you explain the features of Plextool,, but you do not say whether you actually used it and whether it actually erases data. This is very important as a study done at UCSD www.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf showed that some SSD drives do not erase data even when they report that they have.This is a subject that this site has never addressed or even acknowledged.
msawyer91 - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
As a freelance software developer of a tool called WindowSMART 2012, which assess the health of hard disks and SSDs, and alerts you via email and on Apple and Android mobile devices, I had a need for SSDs.Since each SSD controller manufacturer (i.e. Marvell, SandForce, Micron) implements SMART attributes differently, I had a need to acquire SSDs (at quite an expense). I trolled the waters looking for the best deals. Some SSDs I looked to buy, knowing I would be selling them on eBay once I was done testing them. Others I was electing to keep, choosing to upgrade laptops to boost their speed. Throw in a caddy from newmodeus.com and I instantly had a dual-drive laptop--SSD for the OS and hard drive for the data. Talk about breathing some new life into a computer!
A few months ago I found this very SSD, the Plextor M3 256 GB, on Newegg. It was on sale for $199.99, and I couldn't pass it up. It had a solid 5/5 egg rating from over 300 reviewers, and finding an SSD at less than a dollar per GB? I was sold. I installed it in a laptop that's functioning as a SharePoint 2010 test server. With the SSD alone, I was easily trimming 10 seconds off of initial page loads. SharePoint is a beast, and a laptop isn't exactly the best suited machine for SharePoint. But for testing and tinkering, it suited my needs.
And this Plextor SSD made that laptop (an HP G60-230US) a whole lot faster. Well done Plextor! You've got a winner in this SSD.
If you want to check out the WindowSMART 2012 tool I put together, you can find it at http://www.dojonorthsoftware.net/TBM/WindowSMART.a...
Matt