Plextor M5 Pro (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on August 31, 2012 11:32 AM ESTPerformance Over Time & TRIM
Just like Plextor's other SSDs we have tested, the M5 Pro comes with Plextor's proprietary "True Speed" technology. At the ground level, "True Speed" is just a fancy name for Plextor's own garbage collection and wear leveling algorithms, which we have found to be fairly effective. As usual, lets run HD Tach on a secure erased drive to get baseline performance:
I secure erased the drive again, filled all user accessible LBAs with sequential data and proceeded with our 20-minute torture test (4KB random writes at queue depth of 32 and 100% LBA space):
There are no surprises here. Write speed is jumping back and forth from as low as 60MB/s to up to 340MB/s. Average write speed is 169.5MB/s, which is similar to what we have seen with other Plextor SSDs.
While 20 minutes of torture is more than enough to create a worst case scenario for a consumer workload, it's not enough to put today's drives in the worst possible state. Thus I secure erased the drive and extended the length of torture to 60 minutes:
And average performance drops to around 50MB/s. That's actually 12.3MB/s slower than what the M5S scored in a similar test, although 50MB/s is fairly normal for non-SandForce SSDs.
Next I let the drive idle for 30 minutes to let Plextor's idle time garbage collection go to work:
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Performance is significantly better compared to what it was before the idle time. Write speeds are now ranging from 80MB/s to up to 340MB/s, and the average ends up being 201.4MB/s. The M5S did recover better from dirty state, although this stuff isn't always deterministic.
Most SSDs are used in TRIM-supported environments thankfully. After 20-minute torture and one run of HD Tach, I TRIM'ed the drive to make sure TRIM works properly:
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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