Plextor M5S 256GB Review
by Kristian Vättö on July 18, 2012 3:00 AM ESTFinal 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.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (7/16/2012) | ||||
| 64GB | 128GB | 256GB | 512GB | |
| Plextor M5S | $100 (MSRP) | $160 (MSRP) | $300 (MSRP) | N/A |
| Plextor M3 Pro | N/A | $175 | $300 | $680 |
| Plextor M3 | N/A | $130 | $250 | $575 |
| Corsair Performance Series Pro | N/A | $190 | $330 | N/A |
| Crucial m4 | $65 | $115 | $210 | $400 |
| Intel 520 Series | $105 | $150 | $270 | $520 |
| Samsung 830 Series | $85 | $150 | $300 | $720 |
| OCZ Vertex 3 | $100 | $100 | $190 | $530 |
| OCZ Vertex 4 | $100 | $120 | $300 | $700 |
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.
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shodanshok - Wednesday, July 18, 2012 - link
Hi Kristian,thank you for your reply.
I understand that measuring WA is your "special sauce" (anything to do with SMART 0xE6-0xF1 attributes ? ;)), but the interesting thing is the Plextor was able to minimize WA while, at the same time, maximize idle GC efficiency.
Other drivers that heavily use GC (eg: Toshiba and previously Indilinx controllers) seems to cause a much higher WA.
Thank you for these comprehensive review.
sheh - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
Thanks.I have to say, though, that it's difficult to give credence to data that is the result of undisclosed calculations, and not even by the hardware manufacturers.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
The method we use was disclosed by a big SSD manufacturer a few years ago. It does not rely on SMART or power consumption, and it can be run on any drive.If we revealed the method we use, we would basically be giving it out to every other site. Tech industry is quite insolent about "stealing" nowadays, getting content from other sites without giving credit seems to be fine by today's standards.
Also, our method is just one way of estimating worst case write amplification.
shodanshok - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
Hi KristianI totally understand your point.
Thank you for these great reviews ;)
sheh - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
I can't say I understand this logic, but so be it. Thanks for replying. :)jwilliams4200 - Sunday, July 22, 2012 - link
Does it work for Sandforce SSDs? Because I noticed your WA chart does not have any Sandforce SSDs.Are you just measuring the fresh out-of-box (or secure erase) write speed with HD Tune, then torturing the drives and then measuring the worst case write speed with HD Tune? Then saying WA = FOB write speed / worst case write speed ?
If that is what you are doing, then I don't think it is very accurate. Any SSDs that have aggressive background garbage collection could make the "worst case" write speed fluctuate or stabilize at a value that does not reflect the worst case write amplification.
Kristian Vättö - Sunday, July 22, 2012 - link
SandForce drives break the chart, hence I couldn't include any. SandForce drives typically have worst case WA of around 2x, though.I still cannot say what our testing methods are. Anand has made the decision that he doesn't want to share the method and I have to respect that. You can email him and ask about our method - I can't share our methods without his permission.
In the end it's an estimation, nothing more. How accurate, it's hard to say as it will vary depending on usage.
jwilliams4200 - Monday, July 23, 2012 - link
So it is TERRIBLY inaccurate, because Sandforce SSDs actually have worst case write amplification of well over 10, just like other SSDs.In that case, I assume I was correct that you are just using ratio of write speeds from HD Tune, but since HD Tune writes highly compressible data, you are getting bogus results for Sandforce SSDs (actually, I should say, even more inaccurate for Sandforce SSDs than for non-Sandforce)
Anand really needs to reconsider some of his policies. This "secret" test method is just absurd.
jwilliams4200 - Wednesday, July 18, 2012 - link
It all hinges on finding a way of measuring "flash writes", the amount erased/written to flash chips, as opposed to "host writes", which is easy to measure (the amount your computer writes to the SSD).Usually you can find or guess which one of the SMART attributes represents flash writes. You can start by doing large sequential writes to the SSD (for which the WA should be close to, but a little over, 1) and monitoring the SMART attributes to see which one changes like it is monitoring flash writes.
I remember some time ago an anandtech article mentioned another way of doing it. I'm not sure if they are using this method now or not (I have my doubts about the accuracy of the method). It had to do with measuring the power usage and somehow correlating that to how much writing to flash is occurring. The reason I have doubts about the accuracy of the method is that it would require measuring a sort of "baseline" power consumption when writing to the flash, and to get the baseline you would have to control the conditions of the write (for example, doing it write after a secure erase) in order that you can guess/assume what the WA is, so that you will then be able to compute the WA in more complicated conditions based on the "baseline". But that is rather like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, so I would not trust the results.
The first method I described is the way to go, unless the SSD does not have a SMART attribute that measures flash writes.
cserwin - Wednesday, July 18, 2012 - link
I have to say seing the Plextor brand name resurface kindles a warm, happy feeling.There was a time when they made the optical drives to have. A Plextor CD-ROM, a 3DFX Voodoo, a 17" Sony Trinitron, IBM Dekstar...
Good luck, Plextor. Nice to see the old school still kickin.