Plextor M5 Pro SSD review - Article

We've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning. And it is surprizing to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though and one brand quite popular in Europe now also has introduced a line of SSDs, In this article we test, benchmark and review the Plextor M5 Pro series SSD. Plextor has developed this product alongside a new Marvell controller tied to 256GB of NAND flash memory it is amongst the fastest drives we have ever tested. 

While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing in a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking. 450 to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 is the norm for a single controller based SSD.  Next to that the past year NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices now roughly settle just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. As such SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream. The market is huge, fierce and competitive, but it brought us where we are today ... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance.

Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive my big chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. You can say that I evangelize SSDs, yes Sir .. I am a fan.

Plextor recently this week has launched a new SSD series as well, developed under SKU Plextor M5 Pro. Plextor outs this M5 Pro with a new Marvell Monet controller tied to high performance 19nm Toshiba Toggle NAND.

And that is an intersting fact all by itself as that means this is the debut of an SSD with 19nm Toshiba Toggle NAND and the Marvell Monet 88SS9187-BLD2 controller. 

Plextor submitted the M5 PRo, a 256GB model with impressive specs. The 256GB models have sutained read/write levels of 540 MB/sec and 450 MB/sec respectively. And with 4K random write performance estimated at 86,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) it's dressed to impress alright. Have a peek, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.

Plextor M5 Pro SSD with 19nm Toshiba Toggle NAND and the Marvell Monet 88SS9187-BLD2 controller