Plextor Updates The Firmware on M5 Pro: Promises Increased Performance, We Test It
by Kristian Vättö on December 10, 2012 2:30 PM ESTFinal Words
It's always great to see manufacturers improving their existing products but the 1.02 firmware for the M5 Pro doesn't really change its ranking. It provides minor tweaks to random IO performance but when looking at the big picture, the changes are fairly insignificant. The M5 Pro is still noticeably behind Samsung's 840 Pro and OCZ's Vector, which are currently in their own class when it comes to performance. Plextor's pricing is, however, pretty competitive and depending on the capacity you can get the M5 Pro for as much as $100 cheaper than the 840 Pro or Vector. Plextor has turned out to be one of the more reliable SSD vendors, although admittedly their customer base isn't as large as some of the other players we cover.
Despite Plextor's reliability, I'm not very comfortable with the high IO latency in the M5 Pro. I would rather have slower peak performance if it translated to more consistent overall performance as the end user is not going to notice the peaks but is definitely going to notice the hiccups caused by frequent, high maximum latencies.
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lunadesign - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
Understood, if my server's workload were to be relatively heavy. But do you really think that my server's workload (based on an admittedly rough description above) is going to get into these sorts of problematic situations?'nar - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
I disagree. RAID 5 stripes, as does RAID 0, so they need to be synchronized(hard drives had to spin in-sync.) But RAID 1 uses the drive that answers first, as they have the same data. RAID 10 is a bit of both I suppose, but I also don't agree that you think that the lack of TRIM forces the drive into a low speed state in the first place.Doesn't TRIM just tell the drive what is safe to delete? Unless the drive is near full, why would that affect its' speed? TRIM was essential 2-3 years ago, but after SF drives GC got much better. I don't even think TRIM matters on consumer drives now.
For the most part I don't think these "steady state" tests even matter on consumer drives(or servers as lunadesign has). Sure, they are nice tests and have useful data, but it lacks real world data. The name "steady state" is misleading, to me anyway. It will not be a steady state in my computer as that is not my usage pattern. Why not test the IOPS during standard benchmark runs? Even with 8-10 VM's his server will be idle most of the time. Of course, if all of those VM's are compiling software all day, then that is different, but that's not what VM's are setup for anyway.
JellyRoll - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
GC still does not handle deleted data as efficiently as TRIM. There is still a huge need for TRIM.We can see the affects of using this SSD for something other than its intended purpose outside of a TRIM environment. There is a large distribution of writes that are returning sub-par performance in this environment. The array (striped across RAID 1) will suffer low performance, constrained to the speed of the lowest I/O.
There are SSDs designed for this type of use specifically, hence why they have the distinction between enterprise and consumer storage.
cdillon - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
Re: 'nar "RAID 5 stripes, as does RAID 0, so they need to be synchronized(hard drives had to spin in-sync.)"Only RAID 3 required spindle-synced drives for performance reasons. No other RAID level requires that. Not only is spindle-sync completely irrelevant for SSDs, hard drives haven't been made with spindle-sync support for a very long time. Any "synchronization" in a modern RAID array has to do with the data being committed to stable storage. A full RAID 4/5/6 stripe should be written and acknowledged by the drives before the next stripe is written to prevent the data and parity blocks from getting out of sync. This is NOT a consideration for RAID 0 because there is no "stripe consistency" to be had due to the lack of a parity block.
Re: JellyRoll "The RAID is only as fast as the slowest member"
It is not quite so simple in most cases. It is only that simple for a single mirror set (RAID 1) performing writes. When you start talking about other RAID types, the effect of a single slow drive depends greatly on both the RAID setup and the workload. For example, high-QD small-block random read workloads would be the least affected by a slow drive in an array, regardless of the RAID type. In that case you should achieve random I/O performance that approaches the sum of all non-dedicated-parity drives in the array.
JellyRoll - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
i agree, but i was speaking specifically to writes.bogdan_kr - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
1.03 firmware has been released for Plextor M5 Pro series. Is there a chance for performance consistency check for this new firmware?