Plextor M5S 256GB Review

Final Words

In a nutshell, the M5S performs exactly like the M3. It's not the fastest SSD in the market, but it provides balanced all-around performance. Some SSD manufacturers rely on compromises and only concentrate on certain areas of performance. A prime example is SandForce. It does well as long as you feed the drive with compressible data - once you switch to incompressible data it's a whole different story. Plextor's approach is to provide good performance regardless of the type or size of data, which I think is the best approach. 

While the overall performance matches the performance of the M3, there have been some welcome, and unwelcome, changes. The more aggressive garbage collection definitely helps if the drive is used in an OS without open TRIM support (*cough* OS X). However, most buyers will likely be running Windows with TRIM support, so the garbage collection is not a major selling point. Furthermore, the increase in load power consumption is a letdown. Desktop users have nothing to worry about, but for laptop owners it can be a big deal if you have a habit of running on battery most of the time. The power consumption is not awful but it was better in Plextor's previous generation SSDs, thus the disappointment.

As always, it all boils down to pricing at the end of the day. Plextor's press release says that the M5S will be available mid-July but I couldn't find it at any US resellers yet. Hence all we have is Plextor's suggested retail prices, which I wouldn't give much value. MSRPs tend to be higher than retail prices. A good example is Corsair's Force Series GS that was released a bit over a week ago. Its MSRPs were $190 for 180GB, $240 for 240GB, $350 for 360GB and $490 for 480GB; yet NewEgg was selling the drives for $175, $220, $320 and $450 on the launch day. I would expect the prices of M5S to drop to around the same level as the M3 is currently retailing for in a month or so. SSD prices fluctuate a lot anyway so it's impossible to recommend a drive based on pricing because the situation may be totally different tomorrow.

All in all, Plextor's M5S is a good drive but it doesn't really bring anything new to the market. The M3 has been available since late 2011 and the M5S is basically M3 with a couple changes. However, it's evident that something faster is in the works because why would Plextor dump the faster M3 Pro in favor of M5S. It seems that the limits of Marvell's 88SS9174 controller have already been reached, so it's probable that M5S' big brother will be based on Marvell's 88SS9187 controller. We don't know when that is going to be released, but given Plextor's ability to reach top of the class performance with the older 88SS9174, I'm eagerly looking forward to their "M5 Pro" and the controller not being the bottleneck anymore.