Plextor M5 Pro 256 GB Review: 19 nm NAND And Marvell's Latest
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: Iometer
We used an 8 GiB LBA range for each of our Iometer benchmarks, running each test for 90 seconds. We also aligned the read and write access patterns to a 4 KiB sector boundary.
This measurement is useful for looking at the read and write performance of common transfer sizes at queue depths ranging from one to 32. Queue depths in a typical client environment are generally quite low, so the results generated between one and four are of particular interest. Read operations are typically a lot more prevalent than writes operations, so read performance is also most relevant.
Plextor's M5 Pro dominates read performance across all transfers sizes and queue depths, while the Vertex 4 comes out on top in write performance, peaking high and early.
In order to compare our findings to what each manufacturer says its drive can do, we have to convert the MiB/s results to IOPS. Notably, the "up to" results that vendors like to use are typically based on a queue depth of 32, and it's possible to see significant variation in Iometer results depending on the span of the test file and prior write history.
As expected, there is some variation between our benchmark results and those specified by the manufacturers. This comes down to differences in how each company determines its performance specifications, the state of the drives, and the test system used. We're happy to see that Plextor's M5 Pro, though rated for the highest I/O performance, also finishes first in what we measure.
Header Cell - Column 0 | Vendor-Rated "Up to" 4 KiB Read IOPS | Observed 4 KiB Read QD 32 IOPS | Vendor-Rated "Up to" 4 KiB Write IOPS | Observed 4 KiB Write QD 32 IOPS |
---|---|---|---|---|
Samsung 830 | 80 000 | 76 309 | 30 000 | 39 657 |
Crucial M4 | 50 000 | 46 824 | 50 000 | 59 175 |
Vertex 4 | 90 000 | 85 159 | 85 000 | 82 335 |
Plextor M5S | 73 000 | 73 888 | 70 000 | 69 346 |
Plextor M5 Pro | 94 000 | 90 883 | 86 000 | 84 081 |
But those numbers are at a queue depth of 32. Let's instead have a look at 4 KiB read and write performance at a queue depth one, which is where you're going to see more activity. We again converted the MiB/s results to IOPS in our chart below.
Plextor's M5 Pro comes out on top again for read performance, but trails the Vertex 4 on write performance (though not by much).
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Header Cell - Column 0 | Iometer, 4 KiB Read QD 1 IOPS | Iometer, 4 KiB Write QD 1 IOPS |
---|---|---|
Samsung 830 | 5 721 | 15 849 |
Crucial m4 | 5 849 | 15 900 |
Vertex 4 | 7 036 | 16995 |
Plextor M5S | 7 076 | 15 823 |
Plextor M5 Pro | 7 729 | 16 688 |
Current page: Benchmark Results: Iometer
Prev Page Benchmark Results: HD Tune Next Page Plextor Hits A Home Run With Its PX-256M5P-
You have the wrong Marvell controller listed for the crucial M4 and the Plextor M5S. This controller is new.Reply
The old one was the 88SS9174-BKK2.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/plextor-m3-crucial-m4-octane-performance-pro,3178.html -
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.Reply
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 -
SpadeM grantwarI'd love to see how this drive fares against the samsung 840 Pro.Reply
Here you go:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/665?vs=646 -
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:Reply
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. -
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