Plextor M5 Pro (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on August 31, 2012 11:32 AM ESTInside the M5 Pro
The external design is still the same as in the M3 Pro. Likewise, the M5 Pro measures in at 7mm height.
Plextor provides a variety of add-ons in the retail package. There is a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, mounting screws and NTI's SSD utility suite including clone, backup and SSD performance tools (though I've heard the bundled software may be regional. Some European buyers of the M3/Pro have said that their SSD came with Acronis' SSD tools).
Opening up the M5 Pro reveals eight NAND packages and two SDRAM chips. The specific part number for the NAND is TH58TEG8D2JBA8C. The eleventh letter, J, indicates that the manufacturing process is 19nm as the naming system is alphabetical: A stands for 130nm, B for 90nm and so on. The second last character, which is an 8, reveals that the package is quad-die (32GB) and that Toshiba's 19nm MLC die is still 8GB.
Many of you are probably wondering whether endurance has declined with 19nm NAND. Toshiba is very quiet about their NAND so we have absolutely no official word on the P/E cycle count. However, if IMFT's 20nm NAND is anything to go by, we should still expect to get ~3000 P/E cycles out of 19/20nm NAND. We are still nowhere near P/E cycle figures where endurance would seriously be an issue, as we have explained several times in the past.
Our 256GB model has 512MB of cache, which is provided by two 256MB Nanya DDR3-1333 chips.
This is it: The Marvell 88SS9187-BLD2. No specific details are known about the new controller, other than that it supports SATA 3.1 and promises "best-in-class" random read/write performance. SATA 3.1 doesn't bring any significant improvements, altough it brings support for mSATA as well as queued TRIM command (the controller can put the TRIM command in queue and keep doing regular operations until it's free to run the TRIM command). Reduced power consumption is also listed in the release notes, although I doubt we'll see any substantial gains.
Test System
| CPU |
Intel Core i5-2500K running at 3.3GHz (Turbo and EIST enabled) |
| Motherboard |
AsRock Z68 Pro3 |
| Chipset |
Intel Z68 |
| Chipset Drivers |
Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2 |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-1600 2 x 4GB (9-9-9-24) |
| Video Card |
XFX AMD Radeon HD 6850 XXX (800MHz core clock; 4.2GHz GDDR5 effective) |
| Video Drivers | AMD Catalyst 10.1 |
| Desktop Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| OS | Windows 7 x64 |
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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