Plextor M6V 256 GB SSD review - Introduction

Plextor M6V series SSDs
15nm Toggle NAND SSDs Gone Wild

We review the all new Plextor M6V series SSDs. These SSDs are all about value for you hard earned money. This Toshiba NAND based SSD is positioned to be Plextors effective product in their value series. It is fitted with the latest iteration of Toshiba Toggle NAND flash memory. We are not disappointed at all in regards to performance and price.

Yes, in a storage world dominated by the big guns like Micron and Samsung margins are getting smaller and smaller. Plextor needed to address that to get the price per gigabyte down and offer a competitive solution that is fast, will be excellent in any PC and obviously a product that can compete more along the lines of the Samsung 850 EVO in both price and performance.

To do so Plextor is now offering the M6V series SSD, a Silicon Motion SMI-2246 based controller steers all new 15nm Toggle based NAND flash memory from Toshiba to drive their SSDs to a bargain level. The drive comes in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB, with DRAM cache sizes of 128 MB, 256 MB, and 512 MB, respectively.

Performance wise you are looking at a product series that ranks high up there with the others with speeds running towards 530 MB/sec on reads up-to 450 MB/sec on writes, in specific scenarios and depending on volume size. But there are some cool new options. The end result is an SSD that is fast and competitive in terms of pricing. The series also offers 4K random access throughput of up to 83,000 IOPS (read) (depending on volume size). But with Toggle NAND, writes will be lower in the 42K to 80K IOPS range, that is the trade-off really. As stated, competitive is the key word for this review as over the past month or two the dynamics are changing fast, players like Samsung and Micron (Crucial) have introduced new SSDs that bring the market down to its knees really. It was only last year that we wrote that SSD prices settled at just under 1 EURO per GB for the end-user, at the beginning of the year prices have been hovering at 70 cents per GB and currently you can already find SSDs priced as low as at 35~40 Cents (EURO) per Gigabyte of storage volume. So with that in mind nobody can stay behind.  The M6V series is receiving a 3 year warranty.

PX-128M6V 128GB	€ 69 / 0,53 cents per GB	535 MB/sec Read - 170 MB/sec Write
PX-256M6V 256GB	€ 115 / 0,44 cents per GB	535 MB/sec Read - 335 MB/sec Write
PX-512M6V 512GB	€ 245 / 0,48 cents per GB	535 MB/sec Read - 455 MB/sec Write

The specs are decent enough by any standard. The models have sustained read levels of close to 530 MB/sec and up-to 450 MB/sec writes respectively. Have a peek first, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.