Plextor M6 Pro SSD review - Overview

Plextor M6 PRO SSD gets tested

Today we have the Plextor M6 Pro SSD on our test-bench. Plextor recently released this new addition to their SSD lineup. The series is to compete with Samsung and Micron mostly. This SSD series is tagged PRO, and as such you may expect an extra thing or two in performance. Plextor also includes PlexTurbo, a rather fun second-generation RAM caching software. The end result is a very fast SSD that can keep up with the big players in the channel, yet still remains priced attractively.

The NAND flash storage solutions market is tough. Basically all manufacturers have placed products on the market that are SATA3 compatible. And with that interface reaching its limits, many of these manufacturers run into that very same limitation making all these guys perform really close to each other. For the consumer that is great as your main focus does not have to be the SSD performance that much anymore. No your focus should be reliability, endurance and obviously price. So, with the arrival of 19 and 20nm NAND Flash based M6 Pro SSDs, this series is aimed at high-end class consumers. The new M6 PRo SSDs debut in storage capacities of 128, 256 and 512 GB. The series will be based on a Marvell 88SS9187 controller tied to a DRAM cache and A19 nm Toshiba toggle flash memory. That last one is a nice change.

Now, we've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning. And I've stated it a couple of times already, it really is surprising to see where we have gotten in such a rapid time-frame. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing at a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking. 450 to 550 MB/sec on SATA3 is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that, over the past year NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices now roughly settle well 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 to where we are today... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has an HDD, everything runs on SSD, while I receive and retrieve my bigger 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, an SSD addict if you will.

For today's review we'll put the successor of the M6 series under the microscope. The new M6 Pro SSDs ship in capacities up to a kick-ass 1TB. For Plextor this is the first SSD to survive Plextor’s new strict, enterprise-grade, Zero-Error standard of 1008 hours (they test 400 SSDs simultaneously and all need to pass). The new series comes with a good 5-year Plextor warranty. These SSDs can reach speeds of up to 100,000/88,000 IOPS on random read and writes as well as 545/490 MB/s speeds on sequential read and writes. 

Let's start up the review, shall we?

Plextor 256GB M6 Pro SSD with 256 GB A19nm Toshiba Toggle NAND and the Marvell 88SS9187 controller