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Solid State Drives have revolutionised the industry in recent years and are adopted now in a wide range of laptop and desktop computers.
With prices dropping in the last year there is very little reason not to upgrade a home system, especially as software such as Acronis Drive Image makes the mirroring process as simple as a couple of button clicks.
While 2.5 inch drives have been growing in popularity, many laptop and desktop motherboards are incorporating an mSATA slot for additional storage and compact boot options. Sadly many of these slots are still limited to SATA 3Gbps speeds meaning that a purchase of a premium SATA 6Gbps drive could be wasted money.
As we mentioned earlier in the review we test mSATA drives with an Aleratec MiniPCIe mSATA to SATA SSD Adapter so we can directly test the performance of the drive, rather than a potentially limited motherboard slot.
The results we have presented today are the maximum speeds of the Plextor 128GB M5M mSATA SSD, but it is worth looking into the technical details of the mSATA slot in your system as it might be sharing the mSATA slot with a SATA 2 rated port. If this is the case, you can expect speed limitations around the 280 MB/s mark.
The Plextor 128GB M5M mSATA SSD is actually extremely good value, retailing for only £93.74 inc vat in the UK today. We can see no reason not to recommend the drive especially as it delivers such balanced, high performance results with both compressible and incompressible data.
Pros:
- Good (128GB) size for a boot drive.
- excellent compressible and incompressible performance results.
- very competitive pricing.
Cons:
- Be aware of many mSATA slot limitations on current motherboards.
Kitguru says: A wicked fast mSATA drive suited for boot duties.
Sadly my motherboard hasn’t got an mSATA slot as this would be awesome for a boot drive, and it wouldn’t really take up any physical space inside the case.
Are all motherboards currently limited to SATA 3Gbps on their mSATA slots? probably still fast enough for a boot drive, but you would like to be sure you are getting the full 6Gbps.?
good review, nice to see you doing the tests the right way, rather than plug into a mSATA enabled motherboard.
I bought an mSATA drive and it is indeed limited to around 270-280MB.s in my gigabyte board. still works ok as a boot drive, but the design of many boards now is sharing the mSATA slot with a standard SATA port. its not a great idea for performance. hopefully the next generation of motherboards sort this out.
great price on this one. last time I looked they were more than twice the price of a SATA drive.
How can you tell if a laptop has one of these mSATA ports?
Finally, a good review of this drive. I was contemplating it for a few weeks now but wanted more information and testing of the drive, rather than the limited mSATA port on most motherboards. I have a server board which offers the full speed on the mSATA port. I will be picking a few of these up. thanks for the review big HELP!
Well this is good to see. I have a slot on my board and didn’t even notice it until I read this review. might pick one up