The Plextor M9Pe NVMe SSD Review: Teaching An Old Chip New Tricks

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The average data rate of the Plextor M9Pe on The Destroyer is a clear step forward from Plextor's previous TLC-base NVMe SSD (the M8Se), but there are plenty of other recent TLC-based drives that perform much better, and the M8Pe with planar MLC is still faster than the M9Pe.

The average latency of the 512GB M9Pe matches that of the Intel SSD 760p, but without a 1TB 760p to compare against the 1TB M9Pe's average latency looks quite poor. The 99th percentile latencies of both M9Pe capacities are also worse than they should be, but don't stand out quite as much from the relevant competition.

The average write latency scores from the M9Pe rank a bit better than the average read latency scores, but in both cases the M9Pe is clearly slower than the top tier drives from Samsung and Western Digital.

The 99th percentile read and write latency scores from the M9Pe are an improvement over the planar TLC-based M8Se, but the scores still aren't great. The 512GB model has trouble staying ahead of the Crucial MX500 and MyDigitalSSD SBX.

Energy consumption from the M9Pe during The Destroyer is on the high side, but not as bad as the M8Se was. The Samsung 970 EVO's energy consumption is also a bit higher than the M9Pe. The WD Black impresses the most, with higher performance than the Samsung drives while using half the energy.