Plextor M6S & M6M (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on April 10, 2014 6:00 AM ESTRandom Read/Write Speed
The four corners of SSD performance are as follows: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. Random accesses are generally small in size, while sequential accesses tend to be larger and thus we have the four Iometer tests we use in all of our reviews.
Our first test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). We perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time.
While random read speed remains unchanged from the M5 days, random write performance is nicely up. We are still not seeing very high random write performance at low queue depths but some improvement is always better than nothing.
Sequential Read/Write Speed
To measure sequential performance we run a 1 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 1. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.
Both sequential read and write performance are up slightly compared to the M5S and M5M. Even though the improvements are rather marginal (4-13%) at least the performance is going up even though we are dealing with smaller lithography NAND and a more limited controller.
AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Read/Write Performance
The AS-SSD sequential benchmark uses incompressible data for all of its transfers. The result is a pretty big reduction in sequential write speed on SandForce based controllers. In AS-SSD the sequential read performance actually takes a small hit, although it's could be just normal test variation. In any case, we are bottlenecked by the SATA 6Gbps interface when it comes to read performance anyway. Write performance, on the other hand, is up by up to 24%, which is rather significant.
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prime2515103 - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
I find it disappointing how average Plextor has become, yet they keep their pricing at a point where one might expect to get something at least slightly exceptional.I do have an M5M in my laptop and haven't had any problems with it, so I'll give them that. The selection of mSATA drives was pretty sparse when I bought it though, and it was on sale for $108 (which was quite good at the time), otherwise it definitely would not have been my first choice.
Cellar Door - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
I agree, I will be going with samsung evo for my msata drive. Very disappointing for the price.Samus - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
M500 is still the best deal for an average, reliable SSD. Great for basic business and family PC's.rufuselder - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Me too. But either way, there are some much better storage options out there. /Rufus from http://www.consumertop.com/best-computer-storage-g...dylan522p - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
That was good basic explanation of the differences between everyones NAND! Thanks for doing that.nathanddrews - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
The pictures of the IMFT and Samsung processes are all clean and uniform... the Toshiba and Hynix processes look like a 3-year-old with a crayon made them.zodiacsoulmate - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
yea... why they look like that? maybe they are hard to color? why they look so random...extide - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
LOL, I noticed that too, it's like, geez how does that stuff even work! Looks so sloppy!Kristian Vättö - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
Keep in mind that the diameter of the photo is a few dozen nanometers and it's extremely hard to achieve 100% precision with lithographies that small. At least IMFT has been using air gaps before and it's a mature process for them but Toshiba and Hynix added them to the current generation, making it quite new for them.creed3020 - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Kristian thanks for such an in-depth technical and product review. I really appreciate how in your reviews graphs are accompanied with text explaining the results and providing an opinion on the results. I can read a graph but interpretation of those graphs and data trends is often missing from reviews here at AT.I am surprised that such a new drive isn't also available in M2 format but I guess they have the M6e for that. Is there a review of that drive coming as well?