Plextor M5 Pro SSD review

Product showcase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon DSLR using 12 MegaPixel photo's.

Right then, above packaging. The latest and greatest comes in a 256 GB package. Performance is listed at 540MB/s read and 450MB/s writes with 86,000 IOPS at 4k random write aligned disk access with our tested 256GB model.

And there it is, this is the 2.5" SATA III 256 GB version all packaged up in the bundle. You should easily be able to place it somewhere in your chassis. Small and light-weight. The SSD supports TRIM making sure your SSD will regain it's speed once in idle.

Obviously you do need to connect it to a proper SATA 3 (6G) controller though, the best ones can be found on the Intel series 6 and 7 chipset based products. We also find the new AMD FM2 based chipsets like the 85X to perform extremely good.

Included in the bundle is a 3.5" bracket, SATA cable, manual, some screws and one shiny SSD.

When we look at the connectors, we spot the standard power and Serial ATA connectors. This drive is SATA3 (6G). Obviously the drivers are backwards compatible towards SATA2 as well, but the bandwidth limitation there would be capped to roughly 270 MB/sec (which still is silly fast compared to HDDs).

A proper SATA 6G cable is recommended and should be delivered with your motherboard. We however never ever had issues with a standard SATA2 cable either. It seems that SATA3 cables are a little thicker, that's all.

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