Plextor is a new brand in SSD market as compared to the major brands but they made very good SSDs as Plextor M5 Pro 256GB. Obviously we review Plextor M5 Pro 256GB today.This is the first SSD to use Marvell's 88SS9187 128-bit error correction controller, the newer 19nm Toshiba Toggle Mode flash, Enterprise-grade double-data protection and 256-Bit AES encryption. It's made for reliability and Plextor has claimed to have stress tested over 5000 of these with a MBTF rating of 2,400,00 hours. Today they released a new 100K Xtreme firmware update that promises to improve performance over the stated specs.The M5 Pro brings forth some new technology with its 19nm Toshiba Toggle NAND. Toshiba Toggle is the highest performing NAND available to manufacturers, but it does carry a price premium for that distinction. The die shrink to 19nm has reportedly been done with no loss to the underlying endurance of the NAND itself, yet an accompanying throughput increase per die.The new "Monet" 88SS9187-BLD2 controller is the newest offering from Marvell, and offers class-leading features during a time when LAMD has entered the market to compete while SandForce has been quiet on the release of its next controller. This 8-channel NAND flash controller is the third iteration from Marvell and sports dual-core architecture.The PX-M Series of SSDs have gained Plextor a stellar reputation among enthusiasts with its focus on reliability and high performance. Taking things to the next level with the Plextor M5 Pro is only a natural progression from its earlier models. The Plextor M5 Pro sports throughputs up to 540/450 MB/s in sequential read and write speed for the 256GB model we are testing. Adding in a blistering 94,000 random read and 86,000 random write IOPS truly puts the spotlight on high performance.The controller is powered by a dual-core Marvell 88FR102 V5 CPU supporting up to eight NAND flash channels via an ONFI (Open NAND Flash Interface) 2.0/Toggle interface. The interface can support up to 200MB/s per channel. For cache purposes the 88SS9187 supports DDR2-800 and DDR3-800 up to a maximum of 1GB of memory for mapping algorithms.The feature list for the 88SS9187 includes a high performance 128-bit ECC engine that relies on an adaptive read/write scheme; an on-chip RAID technology, which uses firmware algorithms to optimize retiring of defective NAND block and dies, and 256-bit AES data encryption. It also supports TRIM, S.M.A.R.T and NCQ.Plextor has only recently entered the SSD market, and that choice was definitely a wise one. With the decline of optical storage for digital data in the mainstream Plextor has begun the shift to the storage medium of the future. Even car stereos now have internal drives and USB ports and movies come over the Net. Small USB sticks with serious capacity are definitely affecting the optical storage market as well. Optical data storage isn't dead yet, but its days of mass proliferation are definitely numbered.Performance does dip slightly for the cheaper 128GB variant - which has a smaller cache and fewer NAND memory chips interfacing with the dual-channel controller - but the M5 Pro is a serious bit of kit whichever way you look at it. Plextor bolsters the deal by attaching a five-year warranty as standard, and the bundle includes a 3.5in mounting bracket as well as an installation key for NTI's Echo drive-cloning software.There are cheaper SSDs on the market that offer enough speed to satiate the needs of most consumers, but Plextor's aiming for businesses or extreme home users who are willing to pay the extra for a drive that touts an enviable mix of speed and reliability.Over all Plextor M5 Pro 256GB Perform really well in all the benchmarks so
Lets take a look at BenchMarks results....
- Nice Design and build Quality.
- Excellent Performance.
- Improved Performance than previous Generation.
- Marvell Controller.
- High Speed NAND.
- 5 years Warranty.
- $25-$35 Expensive.
- Reliability is under question mark.
