Power Management

Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.

SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state supported by many drives.

Active Idle Power Consumption (No LPM)Idle Power Consumption

The half watt active idle power consumption of the Plextor M8V is not great, but is a fairly typical value. Most drives using the SM2258 controller draw a bit more power than the M8V.

When the SATA link power management is enabled, the M8V ends up drawing a few mW more than most of the other drives with the same controller, and is substantially more power hungry than the best SATA SSDs.

Idle Wake-Up Latency

The Plextor M8V's idle wake-up latency of about 1.2ms is about average for SATA SSDs, and reasonable given the power savings achieved by the sleep state. Several other drives like the Crucial BX300 and ADATA sU800 have managed much faster wake-up times from the same SM2258 controller.

Mixed Read/Write Performance Conclusion
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  • edgineer - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    What's the actual capacity of this drive, 476 GiB? I hate having to use a calculator/guessing.
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    As with any other 512GB drive, the usable capacity (before partitioning) is 512,110,190,592 bytes.
  • Dragonstongue - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    Crucial MX200 500GB ends up as 465gb usable Win 7 64 build after formatted for use
    Crucial MX100 256 ends up with 238GB usable
  • frenchy_2001 - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    That would be because Windows displays GiB (2^30 bytes) and not GB (10^9 Bytes).
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte
  • bug77 - Thursday, March 22, 2018 - link

    During formatting, some space is reserved for the file system. That is not a limitation of the drive, nor does it make the drive have a smaller capacity.
    You don't like file system's overhead? Use a different file system. Oh wait, you can't do that on Windows :D
  • Holliday75 - Wednesday, March 21, 2018 - link

    These new bots are everywhere. Been seeing them all over Facebook posting on a few of my favorite professional sports teams pages.
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, March 22, 2018 - link

    but, but, but... Mark just promised that they've been driving the culture at Facebook for years, years I say, to improve user experience. don't you believe him?????
  • leexgx - Sunday, March 25, 2018 - link

    can you please fix on mobile view in "Print this article" the "Thanks to" box overrides page width limits so when scrolling up and down it sometimes go left and right

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