With the M5Pro, Plextor have an SSD in their portfolio, which is based on a very well performing and well-known controller from Marvell. Other than that Plextor have optimized the firmware towards maximum performance as well as high endurance. With this drive up their sleeve Plextor wants to steal some market share from their competitors and we're certainly curious how well a job the company did.


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Specifications / Delivery

Model	Plextor M5Pro 256 GB
Capacity	256 Gigabyte
Form Factor	2.5'', 7mm
Memory	219nm Toshiba MLC Toggle NAND, TH58TEG7DDJTA20 3'000 P/E-cycles
Technology
Throughput	540 MB/s sequential read 450 MB/s sequential write 94'000 IOPS 4K random read 86'000 IOPS 4K random write
Cache	512 MB DDR3
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms
MTBF	2'000'000 hours
Acoustics	no noise
Warranty	3 Years
Software	Acronis True Image
MSRP

Already with their M3Pro Plextor had a SATA-III SSD in their portfolio, that was able to win the hearts of many customers. That drive was based on a Marvell 88SS9174 controller and other than that there was 25 Nanometer MLC NAND. Ever since Plextor offered a very reasonable mix regarding performance as well as reliability. With the M5Pro the manufacturer released the successor of the M3Pro and this time, there is a new controller as well as new NAND flash memory. Taking a closer look at the controller we find a Marvell 88SS9187. Unfortunately there is no in-depth information available on this chip. We only know it supports SATA 3.1 and therefore queued TRIM as well as mSATA. In case of the NAND Plextor is buying 19 Nanometer MLC Toggle NAND from Toshiba, which offers about 3'000 P/E-cycles. A closer look at the PCB reveals there also is a 512 Megabyte DDR3 cache. Overall this sounds like a resonable combination and we'd expect rather decent performance from this drive, since Plextor is well-known to have a capable firmware team.

A quick look at the bundle shows, there is a 3.5 inch adapter as well as a serial number to download a copy of Acronis Disk Image.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 6 - Random write KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 8 - Random write IOPS
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 9 - Random read IOPS
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 10 - Conclusion