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The latest addition to Plextor's range of SSDs is the M8P line of drives. The M8P family is the company's first SSD range to use NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory) architecture and comes in two formats – an HHHL add-in card for motherboards without an M.2 slot and a 2280 M.2 drive, both using a PCI-e Gen3 x4 interface.
The HHHL (Half-Height/Half Length) drive is the M8Pe(Y) while the M.2 drive comes in two versions, the M8PeGN and the M8Pe(G) which we are reviewing. The difference between the two M.2 drives is that the M8Pe(G) comes with a fancy heatsink and the M8PeGN doesn't. Both formats of the drive have the same capacities; 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and the flagship 1TB model.
Plextor quote performance figures for the 512GB drive of up to 2,300MB/s for Sequential reads and up to 1,300MB/s for writes. Random 4K IOPS performance is listed as up to 260,000 IOPS for reads and up to 250,000 for writes.
The drive comes with Plextor's TrueSpeed and TrueProtect technologies. TrueSpeed technology is an exclusive firmware feature that brings together several Plextor technologies to ensure long-term SSD performance at like-new speeds, preventing drops in read/write speeds after periods of use and when the SSD is nearly full.
TrueProtect combines Plextor's real-time debugging technology together with ECC 128-bit error correction and Flash self-testing to ensure that data remains error free. Added to these technologies is the 3rd generation LDPC technology provided by the Marvell 88SS1093 controller which aids the drive's reliability.
The official Plextor figure for the 512GB drive's endurance is 768TBW which works out at around 420.8GB host writes a day for the length of the 5-year warranty that Plextor back the drive with.
Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB
NAND Components: Toshiba 15nm Toggle MLC
Interface: PCI-e (NVMe)
Form Factor: M.2 (2280)
NAND Controller: Marvell 88SS1093
Dimensions: 80 x 22.85 x 4.79mm
Drive Weight: 13g
Firmware Version. 1.01
The M8Pe(G) comes in a pleasant looking box which mimics the finish of the drive's heatsink. The box front has a rectangle cut into it to expose the drive inside which sits in an easy to open blister pack. Along with the drive's name and branding, there is a small capacity label and a number of icons showing some of the drive's features.
The only other thing in with the drive is a small mounting screw sealed inside a small resealable plastic bag.
The rear of the box has a table showing the whole drive range's capacity offerings' sequential and random read/write performance along with a small list of specifications. Along with these are multilingual statements about the NVMe interface.
Try as we might, we couldn't get the heatsink off our review sample to show the components underneath. It was stuck like the proverbial limpet on top of the NAND, but going on photographs of the M8PeGN we know how the drive is laid out.
All the components of the 512GB drive sit on one side of the PCB. Sitting nearest to the mounting screw end of the board are two packages of Toshiba 15nm MLC Toggle NAND. Next up, there is a single 512MB LPDDR3 cache IC and finally the Marvell 88SS1093 controller.
Built on a 28nm process, the 8-channel 88SS1093 is the company's first NVMe capable controller and it can support TLC/MLC/SLC as well as 3D NAND. To enhance TLC NAND's reliability it also features Marvell's 3rd-genaration LDPC technology.
Testing Methodology
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
The Windows NVMe driver was used for testing as the Plextor driver is not currently available.
Main system:
Intel Core i7 4790K with 16GB of DDR3-2133 RAM, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an ASRock Extreme 6 motherboard.
Other drives
Kingston HyperX Predator 480GB
OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Plextor M6e Black Edition PCIe 256GB
Samsung SSD960 PRO 2TB
Samsung SSD950 PRO 256GB
Samsung SM951 256GB
Samsung XP941 512GB
Toshiba OCZ RD400 512GB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
AS SSD.
IOMeter
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.
Plextor's M8Pe(G) is a very quick drive, particularly when it comes to reads. Having said that, it is no slouch when it comes to writes at even fairly deep queue depths either.
At a queue depth of 1 it is still impressive when it comes to 4K writes, but less so when it comes to 4K reads.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
The official Sequential read/write performance figures for the 512GB drive are listed as 2,300MB/s for reads and 1,300MB/s for writes. These speeds were confirmed by the ATTO benchmark with the drive producing a little more read performance than the official figure, at 2,400MB/s.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
AS SSD is another test where the M8Pe(G) scores highly. It's interesting to contrast the drive with the last PCIe interfaced Plextor drive we looked at – the M6e Black Edition. It's a sign of how far SSD technology has progressed in the year since the M6e was launched that its performance is totally eclipsed by the M8Pe(G).
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable.
Plextor quote random 4K read and write performance of the M8Pe(G) at up to 260,000 IOPS for reads and up to 250,000 for writes. With our IOMeter test configuration, we got reads of 204,285 IOPS and writes of 141,922 IOPS which are some way off the official figures but still show the drive to be a powerful performer.
To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images).
10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
As you might expect, the real life file transfers were dealt with by the M8Pe(G) without any problems. The performance figures do drop back somewhat when dealing with the smal bity files of the 50GB File Folder transfers, however.
The last Plextor drive we looked at that used a PCIe interface was the M6e Black Edition (PCIe Gen2 x2 and ACHI). It's a sign of how fast the SSD segment is moving. Just some 18 months later we have a drive that not only uses the next generation of the PCIe specification running at x4 speed, it also uses the latest NVMe architecture designed from the ground up to support Flash NAND. All of which give the M8Pe(G) performance that is a huge leap forward over the previous M6e Black Edition.
Under the ATTO benchmark, the drive confirmed Plextor's Sequential read/write (2,300MB/s and 1,300MB/s respectively) figures and in fact even bettered the read performance slightly by producing a score of 2,400MB/s for reads and 1,303MB/s for writes.
Plextor quote random 4K figures for the drive at up to 260,000 IOPS for reads and up to 250,000 for writes. With our test method, we got 204,285 IOPS for reads and writes of 141,922 IOPS, which may be some way shy of the official figures but still make the drive the third fastest drive we have seen to date for read performance and fourth fastest for writes. It has just under twice the write and over twice the read performance of the previous generation M6e Black Edition .
Plextor make a point on the web page for the M8PeG of stressing the testing the drive goes through before it's let out of the building. This is testing which includes a 100% burn-in and age test, a 48-hour sustained read and write test, a 1008 hours of zero error testing and a 250 time power cycle test. All of these steps help push the drive towards its 2.4 million hour MTBF.
The 512GB version of the Plextor M8PeG costs around £248 (inc VAT), but at the time of writing the drive is very hard to find. Plextor tells us that retail availability is expected to be towards the end of November.
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Pros
- Performance
- Heatsink
Cons
- Very hard to find
- No software management support at present.
KitGuru says: The M8P drives are the first in the Plextor arsenal to use the NVMe specification and it's a mightily impressive first step.
“AS SSD is another test where the M8Pe(G) scores highly. It’s interesting to contrast the drive with the last PCIe interfaced Plextor drive we looked at – the M6e Black Edition. It’s a sign of how far SSD technology has progressed in the year since the M6e was launched that its performance is totally eclipsed by the M8Pe(G).”
The M6e is limited to pcie 2.0×2 lanes, so comparing that to the m8pe which is pcie 3.0×4 is apples and oranges…you can’t really determine if the performance jump is due to more lanes, better nand, a better controller or all of them.
it’s easy to get here in the U.S., and it’s the cheapest of the high performance pcie 3.0×4 m.2 drives with the 512GB m.2 version, like in the review, going for $239 USD(€218/£197) on newegg
Thanks for pointing that out. I have updated the “hard to find” comment to point out that it is in reference to the UK market, at the time of writing.
Just a quick question. Do those SSDs need UEFI bios to work or they will work properly even with motherboards having legacy BIOS? Thanks in advance!