Plextor M5 Pro Review
1. Intro
2. Package content
3. Specifications
4. The test system
5. Installation & Benchmarks
6. Conclusion
Intro
The reason why I choose for this SSD is because of the positive experiences I had with Plextor with all their products.Think of CD Rewriters , DVD Rewriters and Blu-ray Rewriters.Think of the offered product support ,like customer service and the warranty was always very good ( 5 years ).I will always be a satisfied customer for these products.The thing is I have never had a SSD from Plextor but I think I wont regret it.In this review I hope to show you the specifications and expectations from this SSD will correspond with the theory.
The SSD came in this nice package.
Package content .
• Packaging with seal for the SSD
• Bracket
• Screws
• SSD
• Warranty book
Packaging
Seal of protection
Packaging of the SSD
The beautifull alu brushed look of the Plextor M5 Pro
The Bracket
Specifications
Hight: 0.7cm
HDD Read 540MB/s
HDD Write 450MB/s
Read IOPS 4KB: 100.000
Write IOPS 4KB: 86000
Capacity 256GB
HDD Cache 512MB
SSD-controller Marvell 88SS9187
HDD bus SATA-600
SSD type: Multi-level cell
The SSD has a tight look.The cover look like its alu brushed en feels solid.Except from that its only 7mm thin and comparing with the Samsung Galaxy S2 .
Plextor M5 Pro vs SGS II
The test system
The systeem where the benchmarks will run is :
FX-8320 8x4Ghz stable
2x2Gb HyperX 1866 Geheugen
Asrock 970 Pro 3
Powercolor 7870 2GB GDDR5 Myst edition
Windows 7 Pro x64
Installation & Benchmarks
*All benchmarks will be runned on a SATA-3 poort ( SATA 600 )
After everything was unpacked and connected it was time to see if the theory and practical specs have things in cummon.Anyways what I am going to show you will be stated next and putted to the test!
• Plextool
• CrystalDiskInfo
• CrystalDiskMark
• HD Tune
• AS SSD
• Atto SSD
Plextool
First I downloaded a the tool from Plextor called Plextool.With this tool you can see in an instant what your health , temperature , free space and the power on hours are.Further you can upgrade your firmware , format and see the SMART details , see some info and start a diagnoses.
What cought my attention is that the SSD is delivered with the latest firmware.
Firmware version v1.02.This is good and a +1 for Plextor in my opinion.
CrystalDiskInfo.
CrystalDiskInfo gives besided the easier specification also the techinical detals of the SSD.
Here is a screenshot from CrystalDiskInfo.
CrystalDiskMark:
CrystalDiskMark is a synthetic benchmark which read and writes randomly to the SSD.
This benchmark shows how the performance is generally.With a promised 540mb/s read and a 450mb/s write shows that the score is very close to the technical details shown before.
HD Tune
HD Tune is a good program with allot of options. I started with the transfer read and write benchmark. The read test can be started directly but the write test requires a disk with no partitions and no data. If you do have it he will ask you to delete it.
This write test scores lower than CrystalDiskMark because its a mixed test. The rated speed for this came out on 297.8MB/s.
The read test scores again lower than CrystalDiskMark because its a mixed test.
The rated speed for the read test was 371.9MB/s.
Read: 371.9Mb/s
Write: 297Mb/s
I also have runned a full benchmark.This test shows the speeds for writing and reading to different locations on the disk.
The average speeds on this test are higher because this is a sequential benchmark.
Read: 498.6 Mb/s
Write: 429 Mb/s
AS SSD
The reason why I also chosed for AS SSD is because this program uses data which is not packed.
AS SSD does read and write tests.First there will be tested with blocks of data of 4kB with one instruction at a time and after with 4kB datablocks with 64 instructions at once.
At last the sequential test with read and writes at the same time with large data
The results in MB/s
The score in IOPS
Atto Disk benchmark
As last the Atto Disk benchmark which read and writes randomly different size of data to the blocks on the SSD. We choose the 4kB and 1MB tests.The 4kB test are representive to work with small files .These small files are cummon used to startup software.The 1MB tests are best—case scenario for the SSDs and gives you the right info so you know what to expect when u copy big files like pictures , mp3 and movies.
With the ATTO Bencharm it's usefull to have listed all tests to compare them.Notwithstanding that this is shown most of us will look to the 4kB and the 1MB results.This is because here are the biggest differences.What you also see is that from 512kb/1MB the differenes until 8MB are negligible comparing to the 4KB.
The 4kB gave a result of 139.663 MB/s write speed and a read speed of 142.054 MB/s.
From the 1MB test came a write speed of 446.329 MB/s and a read speed of 540,474 MB/s.
Conclusion:
The M5 Pro is not the cheapest but looking to other details Plextor brought a good product to the market and reasonable write and read speeds and a good price for it because of the 5 year warranty that they give on all their SSDS.I am convinced it is worth to spend a bit more cash for a stable and long term warranty SSD like Plextor offers.