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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jwilliams4200 - Thursday, December 13, 2012 - link
If SSDs were not to be used for heavy workloads, then the warranty would state the prohibited workloads. But they do not, other than (most of them) giving a maximum total amount TB written.The fact is that SSDs are used for many different applications and many different workloads.
Just because you favor certain workloads does not mean that everyone does.
Fortunately, not everyone thinks like you do on this subject.
JellyRoll - Thursday, December 13, 2012 - link
I would ask you to explain why there is a difference between Enterprise class SSDs and consumer SSDs.If there is no difference in the design, firmware and expectations between these two devices then I am sure that the multi-billion dollar companies such as Google are awaiting your final word on this with baited breath. Why, they have been paying much more for these SSDs that are designed for enterprise workloads for no reason!
You would think that these massive companies, such as Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, and Google with all of their PHDs and humongous datacenters would have figured out that there is NO difference between these SSDs!
Why for their datacenters (which average 12 football fields in size) they can just deploy Plextor M5s! By the tens of thousands!
*hehe*
JellyRoll - Wednesday, December 12, 2012 - link
Also, operating systems and applications that delete data, such as temp and swap files, that do not end up in the recycle bin are subject to immediate TRIM command issuance. These files, thousands of them, are deleted every user session and are never seen in the recycle bin. Care to guess how many temp and cache files Firefox deletes in an hour?jwilliams4200 - Thursday, December 13, 2012 - link
So now every SSD user must run a web browser and keep the temporary files on the SSD?Who named you SSD overlord?
skytrench - Thursday, December 13, 2012 - link
Though I side with JR, in that the published IO consistency check doesn't show anything useful, modified it might have been an interesting test...(different blocksizes, taking breaks from only writing, maybe a reduction of load to see at which level the drives still perform well etc.etc).I find the test disrespectful to Plextor, who after all have delivered an improved firmware, and Anand to come out of this one lacking in credibility.
JellyRoll - Thursday, December 13, 2012 - link
The point is that since the files are subject to immediate issuance of a TRIM command and this cannot be done when testing without a filesystem, is that you cannot attempt to emulate application performance with trace-based testing and the utility they are using. This doesn't just apply to browsers either, this applies to ALL applications. From games, to office docs, to Win7 (or 8), or a simple media player.All applications, and operating systems, have these types of files that are subject to immediate TRIM commands.
gostan - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
Hi Vatto,possible to get the samsung 830 through the performance consistency test? I know it's been discontinued but it's still available for sale in many places.
Cheers!
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
I don't have any Samsung 830s at my place but I'll ask Anand to run it on the 830. He's currently travelling so it will probably take a while but I'll try to include it in an upcoming SSD review.lunadesign - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
WOW! My jaw hit the floor when I first saw the 1st graph.I totally understand that the consistency test isn't realistic for consumer usage. But what about people using the M5 Pro in low-to-moderate use servers? For example, I'm about to set up a new VMware dev server with four 256GB M5 Pros in RAID 10 (using LSI 9260-8i) supporting 8-10 VMs. In this config, I won't have TRIM support at all.
If I understand this consistency test, the drive is being filled and then its being sent non-stop requests for 30 mins that overwrite data in 4KB chunks. This *seems* to be an ultra-extreme case. In reality, most server drives are getting a choppy, fluctuating mixture of read and write operations with random pauses so the GC has much more time to do it work than the consistency test allowed, right?
Should I be concerned about using the M5 Pro is low-to-moderate use server situations? Should I over-provision the drives by 25% to ameliorate this? Or, worse yet, are these drives so bad that I should return them while I can? Or is this test case so far away from what I'll likely be seeing that I should use the drives normally with no extra over-provisioning?
JellyRoll - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
For a non-TRIM environment this would be especially bad. You are constrained to the lowest speed of each SSD. In practical use in a scenario such as yours you will be receiving the bottom line of performance constantly. The RAID is only as fast as the slowest member, and with each drive dropping into the lower state frequently, one SSD will surely be in this low range constantly. Therefore your RAID will suffer.These SSDs are simply not designed for this usage. They are tailored for low QD, and the test results show that clearly.