Plextor Hits A Home Run With Its PX-256M5P
Plextor's M5 Pro is the first drive from any vendor to use Toshiba's 19 nm NAND, and it's the second SSD equipped with Marvell's 88SS9187-BLD2 controller. The combination of both advancements, in conjunction with the company's custom firmware, delivers very stable, consistent, and fast performance.
Read speeds are the fastest we have seen to date. And although OCZ's Vertex 4 capped our write benchmarks, the M5 Pro is unique in the speed and consistency of its write performance. The Vertex 4 can't match it there.
Plextor delivers more than just great performance, however. The company has a reputation for quality that comes from its experience with optical storage. Although its SSDs are sourced from somewhere else entirely, the M5 Pro is still backed by five-year warranty coverage, which is something that can't be said for many competing client-oriented drives.
The M5 Pro family also adds features that aren't available from the M5S series, such as full-drive encryption via AES-256 and the latest 128-bit error correction codes.
We've been running the M5 Pro in our workstation for a few weeks to get a better feel for its performance over time. As with the M5S we reviewed previously, this drive continues to operate trouble-free. It looks like the 128 GB M5 Pro is started to show up online for about $130, but the 256 GB model is still missing in action. Should the company achieve a similar $1/GB price range, then this is undoubtedly going to be one of the fastest, most consistent SSDs on the market.