Plextor M5 Pro (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on August 31, 2012 11:32 AM ESTPerformance Over Time & TRIM
Just like Plextor's other SSDs we have tested, the M5 Pro comes with Plextor's proprietary "True Speed" technology. At the ground level, "True Speed" is just a fancy name for Plextor's own garbage collection and wear leveling algorithms, which we have found to be fairly effective. As usual, lets run HD Tach on a secure erased drive to get baseline performance:
I secure erased the drive again, filled all user accessible LBAs with sequential data and proceeded with our 20-minute torture test (4KB random writes at queue depth of 32 and 100% LBA space):
There are no surprises here. Write speed is jumping back and forth from as low as 60MB/s to up to 340MB/s. Average write speed is 169.5MB/s, which is similar to what we have seen with other Plextor SSDs.
While 20 minutes of torture is more than enough to create a worst case scenario for a consumer workload, it's not enough to put today's drives in the worst possible state. Thus I secure erased the drive and extended the length of torture to 60 minutes:
And average performance drops to around 50MB/s. That's actually 12.3MB/s slower than what the M5S scored in a similar test, although 50MB/s is fairly normal for non-SandForce SSDs.
Next I let the drive idle for 30 minutes to let Plextor's idle time garbage collection go to work:
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Performance is significantly better compared to what it was before the idle time. Write speeds are now ranging from 80MB/s to up to 340MB/s, and the average ends up being 201.4MB/s. The M5S did recover better from dirty state, although this stuff isn't always deterministic.
Most SSDs are used in TRIM-supported environments thankfully. After 20-minute torture and one run of HD Tach, I TRIM'ed the drive to make sure TRIM works properly:
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TemjinGold - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
Was looking forward to this drive beating the Vertex 4 but not only does it not do that, it also costs a ridiculous amount...scottwilkins - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
I'd call it a win if Plextor does better with less DOA units and better customer support. Every OCZ I've bought has required a firmware update, which are hard to do at best to start with. And I've just had too many OCZ failed drives. Sometimes second place is better, and in this case it might very well be so.LB-ID - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
Amen to that, brother. OCZ drives are released in an alpha/beta state, and their support is simply atrocious. I'd far rather pay a little more and deal with a reputable company than go through the nightmare that is 'working' with OCZ.heffeque - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
Plextor, unlike OCZ, does have a 5 year warranty...extide - Saturday, September 1, 2012 - link
actually, all Vertex 4's have 5 year warranty tooTemjinGold - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
I would agree if they were close to the same price. Plextor is better but not for nearly 2x the price.hansmuff - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
Kind of depends on how much your time is worth. If you have a lot of downtime due to the SSD crapping out, the Plextor might be well worth it.CeriseCogburn - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
That's another reason why nVidia wins over amd gpu's.iamezza - Saturday, September 1, 2012 - link
piss off trollstalker27 - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
:) ... he probably didn't get that "piss off troll" translates to "over the past years several large EU retailers have released reliability reports and AMD, in the graphics department, did some of the most reliable cards, Nv... not so much. Cudos to AMD's partners! RIP BFG!