Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
Can you even imagine that we all have moved from 100 MB/sec HDDs towards numbers that are 20 to 30 fold of that? Next to that NAND prices have been coming down (albeit lately have been going up again due shortages), reliability has been top notch and ever so importantly volume sizes have moved upwards to a level where now 1TB SSDs are getting a norm (slowly). The current new mainstream for SSD storage however is roughly 512GB which offers a nice balance in between performance and value. It truly is staggering to see where we are headed in terms of performance for NAND based flash storage units. For motherboards the industry will need to move to SATA4 rapidly with a serious increase in broad spec'd bandwidth to be able to keep up with M2 form factors and the NVMe protocol. The Plextor M8Se is a product that offers really fast performance in both reads and writes relative to what you pay for it. At just over 1 GB/s writes per seconds it is still twice as fast as a mainstream SATA3 SSD, while topping 2 GB/s reads and thus quadrupling that number compared to a SATA3 SSD. Combined with a 3 year warranty you should be good to go for a long time.
Performance
Overall these new M8Se storage units shine at many factors and on all levels really, IOPS performance is more than good for a consumer, easily over 150K writes. This SSD writes and reads serious amounts of tiny files in a very fast fashion. We stated it before though, IOPS is not something you as a consumer should worry about too much unless you are doing a lot of database related work or create similar workloads on your PC, but this SSD certainly ranks high within this aspect. Trace testing - we feel that one of the best tests in our entire benchmark suite is PCMark Vantage 64-bit. This is a trace test and can emulate what you guys do on your PC but then multiplied by a factor of 100, this test puts more focus on read performance opposed to writing though. The outcome of the results with the M8Se is simply good. Sustained read / write performance, again excellent as advertised. Read performance in particular leads and is top ranking. Overall the series is impressive. Zoom in at both IOPS and trace performance and you'll notice that the SSD can manage serious workloads without breaking so much as a drop of sweat. So whether you write lots of small files, copy big MKV movies or do it all together, the M8se can manage a lot.
Some TLC for the SSD? The Achilles heel for this product series however are its high-stress writes, the SSD has an SLC and DRAM cache, once that runs out the NAND will be written as TLC and from there onward will drop to the 350~500 MB/sec region. That regular SSD performance really. But sure, with reads this unit is simply excruciating fast.
Overall NAND Storage Usage
Any SSD is enjoyable, very much so. If you put a drive like this into your compatible PC, you'll have no idea what is about to hit you. We very much enjoy the grand sustained performance of this SSD series; if you copy a vast amount of compressed data, then the Plextor M8Pe will perform seriously fast in performance. Make no mistake, replacing a HDD with an SSD in your PC eliminates the random access lag of the HDD head, it is no longer mechanical. That combined with the performance SATA3 / M.2 / mSATA offers these days is simply a massive difference and probably the best upgrade you can make for your computer anno 2015.
Pricing & Warranty
By using/writing TLC NAND, Plextor simply can offer a more competitive product pricing wise. For the unit as tested with daughter board and thus cooling you are looking at roughly 279 USD for the 512GB SSD as tested today. The bare stripped version would be 239 USD. Plextor is able to keep the prices more competitive if you'd opt the simple M2 version without heatsink etc. These are street prices incl. VAT for the unit as tested today with that heatsink cover. Not bad, especially when you consider that this is a mainstream class SSD that offers enthusiast class SSD performance (as you are about to find out from our benchmarks). So that is in the 55 cents per GB range. Plextor will give you a 3-year warranty on this series.
Concluding
Plextor are spot on when it comes to design and looks for this M8Se SSD in this PCIe jacket. I already stated it, that SSD daughter-board looks like something that was derived from Batman's tool-belt. The aesthetics are a big part of the design, and by making it all black including the PCB and the subtle LEDs I feel this was simply done right. For those that do not seek a PCIe card daughter-board, you can purchase the M2 models as 'naked' M2 version, and there will be a version with a small heatsink as well. So Plextor is certainly covering its bases.
By utilizing TLC Vertical NAND Plextor is managing to offer a more price competitive product, many of you go 'yuck' when they hear about TLC. But for endurance and longevity it simply is not an issue anymore. The one proverbial Achilles heel for TLC NAND is write performance under heavy stress, with today's tested product you have been able to see that sustained (massive) writes will drop to 400~500MB/sec once the caches run dry. But for a consumer that still is seriously fast perf. Reads wise you are looking at 1.5 to 2.5 GB/sec performance numbers and your random 4K IOPS perf is to be found in 100~200K ranges, I cannot think of a single situation on a game PC where you would be able to stress it like that. I guess you need to ask yourself the question, how fast do these SSDs really need to be ? Not evolving in perf would mean us still be in the stone-age technology wise. But yeah, would you notice an SSD reading at 1 GB/sec compared to 2.5 GB/sec ? We do doubt that a bit. Compared to a regular SSD you can now quadruple your read performance. For writes that is the same or double the performance of today's SATA3 solutions due to the TLC writes.
With the Plextor M8Se your receive a three year carry-in warranty we would have liked 5 years to give the product a little more TLC (pardon the pun here). Whatever you are planning with this storage unit, you are good to go from gaming, overall net PC usage (albeit overkill) to video transcoding and editing and content creation, this is by far one of the faster SSD series available for I/O intensive workloads, consumer grade that is. I understand that usage of TLC remains a bit trivial over MLC, but at its lowest 400 MB/sec writes we also have to acknowledge that it is plenty fast for any enthusiast class gaming rig. The decisive factor will be street prices, as Plextor needs to battle the big guns out there. But looking at it overall this unit comes with great looks, great read performance, okay write performance and a nice price level. Definitely Guru3D.com recommended.
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