Plextor M5 Pro (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on August 31, 2012 11:32 AM ESTThe M3 Pro was one of the fastest SATA 6Gbps SSDs we have tested and I was certain that the M5 Pro would take the crown since it was supposed to be faster than the M3 Pro. However, even though the M5 Pro is faster than the M3 Pro in all of our synthetic tests, it pretty much breaks even in our Storage suites. That doesn't mean that the M5 Pro is slow by any means, it's simply not much of an upgrade. As the M3 Pro is phased out, the M5 Pro will at least be a suitable replacement.
The bigger issue is power consumption. One of the main reasons I liked the M3 Pro was its extremely low power consumption. The M5 Pro consumes significantly more power and performance is only slightly better. For desktop users, the increased power consumption should not be an issue but purchasing decisions for notebook drives are often driven by power efficiency. Higher power consumption obviously leads to worse battery life.
Dealing with a new controller is not always easy, though. Plextor has been using Marvell's 9174 controller since the M2 series, so the same controller has been used in five different SSDs. Plextor has had plenty of time to tweak the 9174 firmware and that's clearly visible in the M3 Pro: performance is finely tuned and the firmware is mature. The M5 Pro, on the other hand, is their first product to use the new 9187 controller and firmware. It's also Plextor's first drive to use 19nm Toshiba NAND. Integrating smaller process geometry NAND has always been a performance challenge, it's possible that we're just seeing the outcome of those difficulties. Finally there's the chance that we're simply hitting the limits of what you can get over 6Gbps SATA. The M5 Pro is by no means a slow drive, it's clearly among the fastest we've tested. There's only so much parallelism you can extract from smaller transfers, and at the high end we've been gated by the SATA interface's limitations.
Despite not breaking any records, the M5 Pro is a good drive. Without any huge increases in performance via firmware updates however, the M5 Pro needs to be competitive on price. The M3 Pro wasn't priced as aggressively as it needed to be, but with the M5 Pro Plextor has another chance.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
37 Comments
View All Comments
BryanBend - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
http://www.amazon.com/Plextor-Series-PX-128M3P-2-5...Just noticed price drop on Amazon just a few minutes ago $84.99 matching Newegg on the 128 M-5, w/o adapter, drive only.
Submitted a price match yesterday.. :)
teefatt - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
I just want to share my experience with OCZ Support Team,I posted the above matters to OCZ forum and got no solution from them after many email in and out in a week time. They want me to write an email to HP for help. They even deleted my reply and make the post like I did not reply their request or reply their mail. Furthermore, they blocked my post. They wanted me to send them a personal email instead of on the public forum.
They moved my post to ForumOCZ Support ForumCompliments, Complaints, & SuggestionsVertex 4 512GB BSOD in RAID 0 setup.
or
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread...
That's why I totally agree with the post here on the first page:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5719/ocz-vertex-4-re...
"It's still a drive from OCZ, a company that has repeatedly and blatantly used its customer base as unpaid beta testers, and lambasted them when they dared to complain about it. No thank you. The fastest drive in the world is of no use to me if it's causing my computer to BSOD constantly. I'll be spending my money and that of my many clients on drives with proven track records for reliability and excellent customer service, both sadly lacking in OCZ products."
I will walk away from this OCZ unreliable SSD. Luckily I am able to return the drives and asked for refund instead of following their steps to do the beta tester.
Think twice before you buy it.
Thanks you.
stalker27 - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
Kristian Vättö, you need to learn your gibies!119,2 Gibibytes (GiB = 1024 MiB) is 128 Gigabytes (GB = 1000 MB)
paulobao - Monday, September 10, 2012 - link
Hi,I'm new here and not much of an expert in this stuff!
Just a silly question but, since I would buy one SSD tomorrow for my Tecra R80 laptop (and I'm for the M3Pro): what to expect from the 512 GB version of the M3Pro (speed, power consumption, etc) when compared to the little brother (256 GB) ?
I want reliability in my first SSD (and some spped too---:-))
Regards,
paulo
GullLars - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Small sequential transfers in ATTO seem to be mediocre on this drive. With just a small bit of the 256MB RAM used for read-ahead that could be fixed for reads. For small sequential writes 128-256KB of the RAM used for "unprotected" buffering (could be safe with caps, not necessarily supercaps) could put the write speed for all smaller transfer sizes close to the 340MB/s mark seen in 128KB seq write IOmeter test.abhilashjain30 - Monday, July 29, 2013 - link
Plextor entered the Indian markets with its range of SSDs by announcing its distributors for India. Plextor SSDs will be Distributed nationally by Mumbai based M/s Prime ABGB Pvt. Ltd. (http://www.PrimeABGB.com / http://www.OnlySSD.com)abhilashjain30 - Monday, July 29, 2013 - link
** http://www.OnlySSD.com