Plextor M6 Pro review: Good improvement over the M5 Pro Xtreme; an able SSD for high end rigs

Plextor M6PRO 256GB Specification

Storage

Capacity	256GB

Form Factor

2.5 inch	Yes

Interface

Serial ATA (SATA)	SATA 6Gb/s

Buffer

Size (Cache)	512MB

Dimensions

Dimensions (W x D x H)

69.85 x 100 x 6.8 mm

Weight

70 g PRODUCT REVIEW It has been quite a while since we last tested solid state drives. Plextor sent us its latest SSDs from the M6 series, namely the higher end M6 Pro and the budget M6S. These two drives address different segments of the market and while we will be reviewing the M6 Pro, we have also included scores from the M6S for reference purpose. Build and Features: 8/10 The Plextor M6 Pro comes in a champagne gold colour with a brush metal finish atop it. The look is premium and the SSD is quite light at 70 grams and measures just 6.8mm thick. The packaging includes eight screws, a 3.5-inch tray and a SATA cable along with the SSD utility tool CD which has software such as NTI Echo 3, NTI Backup Now EZ 3. Apart from this, you also get the PlexTools utility for quick tasks such as firmware flashing, checking drive status, secure erasing the SSD and more. There is a feature called the PlexTurbo, which basically uses SSD RAM caching to give you performance numbers beyond the limits of traditional SATA III interface. Opening the drive is easy thanks to the four screws on the edges. However, you will void warranty once you open up the SSD so please be careful. The Plextor M6 Pro comes in four different capacities: 128GB / 256GB / 512GB and 1TB. We got the 256GB model for test which has Toshiba’s advanced 19nm synchronous toggle NAND flash memory. There are a total of eight Toshiba TH58TEG8DDKBA8C 32GB  chips along with two SKHynix 256MB DDR3 DRAM cache modules. The Plextor M6 Pro employs the Marvell 88SS9187, an 8-channle controller, which houses a dual-core Marvell 88FR102 V5 CPU. Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Performance: 8/10 ATTO Benchmark This is the most popular storage benchmarking tool and allows you to check read and write speeds across various transfer sizes and queue depths. ATTO is also a good tool to check for the marketing spiel of SSD makers where they publish sequential read and write speeds on the packaging. The Plextor M6 Pro is rated at sequential read / write speeds of 545 MB/s and 490 MB/s. A quick look at the ATTO chart above shows that it fulfills that claim. In terms of write speeds, the older Samsung 840 Pro and the Corsair Neutron GTX series still offer higher speeds. There is a significant improvement over the Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme. AS SSD AS SSD is a benchmark tool built specifically for SSDs which uses incompressible data and calculates sequential and random read and write speeds and gives an overall score at the end. It also gives you the input/output operations per second or IOPS for each of those tests which is interesting. Apart from this you can also perform Copy Test where it creates test folders for large files simulating ISO, programs and games and measures the transfer speeds and duration. The AS SSD scores are a bit underwhelming. In 4K random read and write tests too the Corsair and Samsung SSDs speed ahead. The maximum IOPS numbers on the Plextor M6 Pro are less than advertised – up to 100,000 / 86,000 for random reads / writes. PC Mark 7 PC Mark 7 is a complete PC benchmarking solution for Windows 7 having a dedicated Storage test module. It is a collection of workloads that isolate the performance of your PC’s SSD. The Secondary Storage test allows you to test drives other than your system drive. It simulates operations such as importing pictures, gaming, starting applications and so on. Anvil Storage Utilities Anvil Storage utilities is another versatile SSD benchmark tool which besides having an in-built SSD tool, also allows you the option to tweak the settings. Just like the AS SSD benchmark, you get a read, write and an overall score. The tables are more in-depth as it gives you response time, IOPS, MB read/written and finally the transfer speeds in MB/s. You can perform threaded I/O read and write tests where you can adjust block size as well as the queue depth. We ran the SSD test using 100 per cent incompressible and 46 per cent compression. PlexTurbo performance As mentioned above, PlexTurbo uses SSD RAM caching to give you performance numbers beyond the limits of traditional SATA III interface. This means that your most frequently used data (hot data) is cached by your system RAM rather than the DRAM cache in the SSD. The numbers below are dependant totally on your system memory. Plextor claims that the PlexTool software protects data loss if there is an accidental power outage when using RAM caching. Verdict and Price in India Plextor M6 Pro gives a good overall performance with its scores being second only to Samsung’s 840 Pro. Even though the IOPS numbers don’t match up to those advertised, there was no performance hit as such. The M6 Pro can easily be considered if you are looking to build a high performance rig or a workstation. The 5-year warranty is a big plus point. The bundled software also adds a lot of value to the overall package. At Rs 13,000 market operating price, you are getting a cost per GB of Rs 54.51. You can find it online for around Rs 12,500. It will surely face competition from Samsung’s 840 Pro as well as the recent 850 Pro. But we see no reason to not recommend the Plextor M6 Pro. If you are on a budget and can manage with slightly lower speeds, you can check out Plextor M6S which comes for around Rs 8,500 for the 256GB variant.