Plextor 256GB M5S Series Solid State Drive SATA 6.0 Gb-s PX-256M5S

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Price: $186.35 $150.00   

Product Feature

• Made For Real-World Speed: Maximum speed performance during everyday operations - random read speed up to 73,000 IOPS and random write up to 70,000 IOPS.
• Sustained like-new performance which eliminate the sharp drop in performance seen in many SSD devices after periods of real-world use. Exclusive firmware with outstanding Instant Restore feature
• Exclusive technology designed to prevent drastic drops in read/write speeds that normally occur with SSDs after a prolonged use or when data become heavily fragmented
• No loss of speed when working with non-compressible data such as common video, audio, or photo file types. Controller design ensures high stability and performance during multitasking.
• Performance Specification (please insert the attached file "PX-M5S_datasheet_071012_spec_crop.pdf"

Product Description

The M5S Series SSD continues to deliver the highest quality storage performance in the industry. Continuing with the legacy and award-winning performance of its predecessors, the M5S SSD is consistently faster and reliable. Featuring Plextor ��s True Speed Technology, exclusive firmware, and server-grade controller chip, the M5S SSD is capable to deliver stable data transfer speeds over the long period. In actual every-day computing environment, it is able to achieve and sustain the like-new performance even after intense activity. The M5S SSD is engineered to delivers consistent performance. The M5S SSD clocks in random read/write speeds up to 73,000/70,000 IOPS with sequential read/write speeds up to 520/390 MB/s. Coupled with exclusive firmware and True Speed Technology, the reliable M5S SSD provides sustained high speed performance without slowing down while storing and transferring all types of data. Setting a new standard for SSDs, the M5S SSD is designed with a high random read/write speed and consistent performance when working with non-compressible data such as encoded video, MP3 audio, or JPG images. This makes it ideal for use in audio/video workstations as it can provide fast loading and saving times for large files and make the processing of editing far smoother and easier. Also, the M5S� s long-term sustainable high speed performance gives users the fast storage they need to boot, save, and load almost instantaneously.

Plextor 256GB M5S Series Solid State Drive SATA 6.0 Gb-s PX-256M5S Review

There is a huge difference in performance between run-of-the-mill mechanical drives and SSD technology. Plextor is a lesser know brand in the SSD world, possibly due to the cost per GB of their drives. However, their SSD failure rate can be compared with Intel and Samsung drives.

This Plextor M5S 128GB drive has the following advertised stats:

Size: 128GB
DRAM Cache: 256MB DDR3
Sequential Read (6Gb/s): 520 MB/s
Sequential Write (6Gb/s): 200 MB/s
Random Read: 71,000 IOPS
Random Write: 51,000 IOPS
MBTF: 1,500,000 hours
Dimensions: 69.85mm x 100mm x 9.5mm
Warranty: 3-year

Regretfully, the Plextor M5S will not fit into some ultra slim notebooks which require a 7.5mm drive. However, in my case this wasn't an issue and I was able to swap my old mechanical drive for this drive without any problems. This was my very first SSD so I was very curious about real world performance. There is a lot of information out there about SATA III (SATA 6.0Gb/s) performance benchmarks of various SSD manufacturers. I found that it wasn't the case for SATA II, which is what my laptop currently has.

I wanted to install Windows XP on this drive particularly because XP doesn't take up as much space as Windows 7 does. Windows XP does not have TRIM support, but according to my research, the firmware and the Marvell drive controller in the M5S do a great job with garbage collection so TRIM would not be absolutely necessary to keep this drive running at top speed. Before Win XP can be installed, this drive needed to be connected to another computer that already had an operating system installed to align the SSD with DiskPar (there is a great tutorial online for that if you google "align ssd diskpar"). After the drive was aligned and partitioned, I needed to use nLite to create a custom Windows XP disk from the one I already had to add the necessary drives for booting. The reason for this is because SSDs run better in AHCI mode turned on in the BIOS and Win XP does not come with those drivers by default. Again, this was a very simple task. Certain caching/swap/etc was also turned off via nLite (so I wouldn't have to do it all manually after install) to help prolong SSD life.

After booting up with XP, the entire install took around 5 minutes from start to finish. Now that's fast. I benchmarked the drive after XP was installed. You can see the results of this drive vs the old hard drive I had installed by viewing customer images for this product. In general I got about 267 MB/sec seq. Read and 209 MB/sec seq. write which is generally in line with SATA II throughput. The random read/write test speeds, which matter most when it comes to file access by a drive, were a magnitude higher than the old mechanical drive at 21MB/38MB vs 0.5MB/1.5MB.

Overall I have no regrets about this purchase. If anything, I should have done it sooner. Currently, after using this drive for a while, its speeds have dropped by a whopping 2MB/s on seq read/write and 1MB/s on random read/write. What a degradation in performance over time (not srs). The only thing I really wish this drive did was to allow you to see total GB written/read (total host reads/writes) to it so you can gauge its lifespan and reliability better. At this time there is no way for you to see those statistics.

Pros:
- Plenty of space for a boot/OS drive.
- Extremely fast compared to mechanical drives.
- Well designed firmware.
- Low power consumption.
- Quiet.

Cons:
- No way to see total host reads/writes.

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