Plextor M5 Pro 256 GB Review: 19 nm NAND And Marvell's Latest

Features
By Richard Hart
published

Hot on the heels of its M5S, Plextor sent us the M5 Pro. Loaded with hot new technologies like 19 nm NAND and the latest Marvell controller, the company's flagship was certainly worth waiting for. How does it do against the established incumbents, though?

Benchmark Results: Anvil's Storage Utility

We begin testing using Anvil's Storage Utility. The idea is to start with fresh out-of-the-box drives and a 4 GB test file.

Plextor's M5 Pro comes out on top in the read benchmark. Specifically, it does well in 4 KiB transfers, though it falls behind the Vertex 4's write results at queue depths of four and 16. Overall, ASU puts the M5 Pro just behind OCZ's Vertex 4, which was recently augmented with new firmware (OCZ Vertex 4 128 GB: Revisiting Write Performance With Firmware 1.5). But, it still manages to outpace the other competition.

Richard Hart
23 Comments Comment from the forums
  • You have the wrong Marvell controller listed for the crucial M4 and the Plextor M5S. This controller is new.
    The old one was the 88SS9174-BKK2.
    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/plextor-m3-crucial-m4-octane-performance-pro,3178.html
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    can we have a benchmark of the time it takes to install a fresh copy of Win7+SP1 on a SSD ? Because thats the first thing a user will do after buying a new drive.
    Reply
  • echondo
    mayankleoboy1can we have a benchmark of the time it takes to install a fresh copy of Win7+SP1 on a SSD ? Because thats the first thing a user will do after buying a new drive.
    I believe we can all assume it will take around 10-15 minutes. My old SATA2 Vertex drive can have Windows installed with all the Windows updates I want in around 20 minutes, it would be less time but I have to install all my drivers first for my motherboard :p
    Reply
  • fat-chunk
    Long live SSDs!
    Reply
  • grantwar
    I'd love to see how this drive fares against the samsung 840 Pro.
    Reply
  • SpadeM
    grantwarI'd love to see how this drive fares against the samsung 840 Pro.
    Here you go:
    http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/665?vs=646
    Reply
  • JeanLuc
    I was on Youtube the other day on the Corsair channel and they were showing the advantages of 'Ram cache' which was lights years faster then SSD's in therms of throughput. Could Toms consider doing an article into Ram cache as I think it would be of interest to people who have 16-32Gb systems (since DDR3 is cheap at the moment) can spare the extra system ram to cache files and software.
    Reply
  • merikafyeah
    SpadeMHere you go: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/665?vs=646Wow. The 840 Pro beat the M5 Pro in virtually everything according to that data. The 840 Pro does cost significantly more though.
    Reply
  • merikafyeah
    JeanLucI was on Youtube the other day on the Corsair channel and they were showing the advantages of 'Ram cache' which was lights years faster then SSD's in therms of throughput. Could Toms consider doing an article into Ram cache as I think it would be of interest to people who have 16-32Gb systems (since DDR3 is cheap at the moment) can spare the extra system ram to cache files and software.TheSSDReview did something similar:
    http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/romex-fancycache-review-ssd-performance-at-13gbs-and-765000-iops-in-60-seconds-flat/

    No point in even comparing RAM to SSDs, as even "slow" RAM is faster than even the best SSDs by about the same amount as the best SSDs are faster than floppy disks.
    Reply
  • aicom
    This review would have been impressive if it was published 2 weeks ago. With the 840 Pro out, it simply blows the M5P out of the water. Too bad it wasn't included in the benchmark charts here.
    Reply