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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sulu1977 - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
Years ago I read that SSDs can easily last a lifetime of normal use, and if they fail, you never lose any data. Now I'm getting the feeling that they can have a higher failure rate than mechanical HDs. This is very disturbing. What's the real truth here?sheh - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
What worries me is the data retention period. The JEDEC JESD218A standard requires, when powered off, only 1 year of retention for Client class drives, and 3 months for Enterprise. This can be higher or lower depending on temperature. I suppose real flash exceeds that, and I suspect drives actively "refresh" stored data when they're powered on, but that's just a guess.I'd like to see an AnandTech article on SSD reliability, including retention, write endurance, trends as manufacturing processes get smaller, SLC/MLC/eMLC/TLC, etc.
sulu1977 - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
Just curious; how many of you would be willing to put priceless photos on a SSD and store it in a drawer for 5 years?sheh - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
There's a lack of info on data retention, so no.flensr - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
How come SSDs seem to always come in 9.5mm when that means you can't use them in many of the newer thin laptops? a 7mm drive can come with a super cheap plastic shim that would make them fit into a 9.5mm chassis, but you can never fit a 9.5mm drive into a 7mm chassis. 9.5mm is a stupid size for an SSD, period. If the SSD is put into a desktop, tower, or HTPC case then the height doesn't even matter at all, and 7mm drives can fit into any laptop using the 2.5" format, normal, slim, or even the less common 12mm height ones.Reviews ought to point out that these 9.5mm drives are totally worthless for upgrading many many laptops now that the slim drives are becoming much more common. Maybe the SSD manufacturers will figure out that there is really no reason at all to make ANY 9.5mm drives, since a simple plastic adaptor will make a 7mm drive fit snugly into a 9.5mm chassis while maintaining compatibility with many more laptops overall.
scbdpa - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
the m3 pro is 7mm. maybe the m5pro will be, tooggathagan - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link
Why the vitriol?It makes you sound like a 12-year-old gamer on Xbox Live.
He states the thickness on the 3rd page of the review.
Given that there are many,many more laptops that CAN use the thicker drives, I don't know why you feel that extra attention needs to be given to that particular spec.
While it may be over the minimum thickness needed for an SSD, the size has been around ever since the laptop hard drive has existed.
I suspect that whoever 1st brought this type of SSD to market simply stuck with the same form factor and everyone else just followed suite.
I doubt a different height was even considered until notebook manufacturers started getting serious about notebook thickness and someone had a light bulb go off in their head.
flensr - Friday, July 20, 2012 - link
Why the vitriol? You prove my point completely in your post. None of your "reasons" make any sense if they put any thought into it, and a 7mm drive would fit into ALL laptops, not just "many many more". So a smart intelligent design choice would lead to compatibility with "all", rather than not thinking about it at all which leaves a growing number of potential customers with a sharply reduced set of options.Hmm. I think that just about defines "stupid" when it comes to marketing and design. Hence, my description of the design as "stupid".
As for what it "sounds like", you sound like a fanboi defending a stupid no-thought-involved design choice simply because the stupid decision doesn't impact you personally yet. You can try to explain it away all you like, but the fact remains that building 9.5mm SSDs excludes a growing percentage of the potential SSD customer base for no reason.
Making it worse, even among companies that do sell 7mm height drives, there is no standard for putting this in the specs. One or two sellers list "7mm" as a height, some go with something like "0.28 inches", and at least one simply describes their drives as "thin enough for slim profile laptops".
I'd have purchased at least 3 SSDs for my laptops by now, except that every time I start looking I find some lower-end ones listed as 7mm, some overpriced ones listed as "super slim on a diet!!!111one", and some with no thickness listed whatsoever that are out of stock yet which I know from a good review are the right size. After a while I put a "notify me" flag on one and give up. That's 3 drives I didn't purchase because the SSD manufacturers are building and marketing drives that exclude me, for no real technical reason. It is as if they don't want me to buy their drives. So I haven't yet. Maybe someday I'll go shopping for an SSD that got a good review, and it'll be competitively priced and have right in the specs "7mm height", and it'll be in stock. I'll buy right then. So far it's been a fight just to identify what size the drives actually are because they keep using the weird 9.5mm height for most drives and seem intent on hiding which drives are 7mm.
waldojim42 - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
Not sure what specs you need for a 7mm drive, but the M3 is 7mm and fits my W520 perfectly.JellyRoll - Friday, July 20, 2012 - link
The excuse for not disclosing the calculation method for write amplification is weak, at best.This calls into question the trustworthiness of the data. Any website that uses 'secret' methods of measurement should be called into question. Does the measurement method favor certain controllers, or types of NAND? Or does advertising revenue affect the results?