The Plextor M6V (256GB) SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on October 12, 2015 8:00 AM ESTIdle Power Consumption
Many SATA drives are getting close to the limits of what our equipment can measure for power consumption. It's hard to build a meter than has sub-milliwatt accuracy and can withstand the high peak currents drawn by devices like high-performance PCIe drives. Our test rig can't measure the deepest power saving modes (DevSlp), but we can look for any red flags that the intermediate modes aren't working.
At this point in the review, it's obvious that the M6V has no trouble keeping power consumption down. There is technically room for improvement here, but not enough to matter.
TRIM Validation
A drive that didn't correctly implement the ATA TRIM command would be very surprising to find today, but it's a quick enough check. This test also demonstrates that, for better or worse, files that are deleted cannot be easily recovered.
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mczak - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link
I beg to differ. For 90% of all use cases, the performance difference of a pcie drive to a sata one will be minimal if not unnoticeable whereas the pcie one is a lot more expensive (for now - I don't see a technical reason for this, really). Whereas everybody probably agrees the performance difference from sata ssd to sata HD is definitely noticeable.Albeit this drive indeed doesn't really offer anything interesting. There's nothing wrong with that but that means it has to nearly exclusively compete based on price, which it currently does not.
svan1971 - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link
simply not true, having used an sm951 for 3 months now the performance increase over the 850 is absolutely noticeable from bootup to shutdown and everything in between.geniekid - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link
http://techreport.com/review/28446/samsung-sm951-p...According to techreport boot times are noticeably faster and general loading times are not.
JimmiG - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
We're still just talking about a few seconds difference. Most people won't notice the difference between a boot time of 37 seconds and 33 seconds. What people will notice is the difference between *any* SSD and any regular HDD.Most consumers should just get the cheapest SSD at the highest capacity they can afford. The performance difference isn't enough to justify going with e.g. a higher-performance 250GB SSD over a slightly slower 500GB drive (which allows you to store more of your data on the SSD instead of your much slower HDD).
mapesdhs - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link
Irony is, right now the 850 EVO is also one of the best value SSDs available. Atm I wouldn't choose anything else for mainstream use.emn13 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Even if this were true (which really depends on your workload - for common workloads it really isn't), that doesn't mean it'd be a good idea to pick between the extremely expensive PCIe solutions and the extremely slow HDD solutions - old fashioned SATA still commands the sweet spot.Perhaps not for much longer, of course :-).
Clauzii - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link
Also, try hotswapping a PCIe-card :)Billy Tallis - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link
M.2 doesn't support hotplug, but it's been part of PCIe forever and is supported by both the normal full size expansion card form factor and the U.2 connector. The problem is that consumer-class systems often don't bother to fully implement support for the feature, though obviously they support it on some level for the sake of ExpressCard and Thunderbolt.Ramalth - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link
Not taking in consideration that you cannot add or replace (most) laptops HDD with PCI-Express versions, so you have to use a SATA drive forcefully ...devione - Monday, October 12, 2015 - link
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