Shortly after the Plextor M3 review went live, I received numerous emails asking us to review Corsair's Performance Series Pro. Your voice was heard and we went and asked Corsair for a review sample, and here we are with the results.

There aren't too many Marvell SSDs on the market so the Performance Pro stole my attention immediately. When testing a SandForce drive, you pretty much know what to expect. Only Intel uses in-house firmware whereas the rest use the firmware that SandForce provides. That limits differentiation a lot. When it comes to Marvell, things are a lot more open and interesting. Firmwares are often proprietary and that's why you never know what to expect. Several readers pointed out the similarity between Corsair's Performance Series Pro and Plextor's M3 & M3 Pro. Maybe all Marvell drives don't carry an in-house firmware after all? Read on to find out if that's true and see how the Performance Pro fares in our tests.

Plextor as a brand is probably a new acquaintance for most people and I have to admit that I had not heard of Plextor until a couple of months ago. Plextor is more known for their optical disk drives but roughly two years ago, they entered the SSD market. Plextor is now at its third generation of SSDs and we have finally got the chance of reviewing their latest offering: The M3. Based on Marvell's 88SS9174-BLD2 controller, the M3 is a direct competitor to Crucial's popular m4 series. Both obviously utilize in-house firmwares, which can lead to big differences in performance.

While Plextor is a relatively small and unknown brand, I can already hint that their offering is not minuscule in performance when put against SSD giants' drives. How fast is it then? Read on and find out!