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The Plextor 128GB M5M mSATA SSD ships in a clear plastic container, tough enough to protect the little drive during shipping. The drive inside measures only 50.8mm x 29.8 mm x 3.6 mm (WxDxH)
The tiny drive is using the Marvell 88SS9187 dual core controller. Plextor vary the DRAM cache according to the capacity – in this case 256MB DDR3. Power consumption is rated at 0.2W when active.
Plextor have placed the controller and two of the four Toshiba 19nm Toggle Mode NAND chips on the top of the PCB. The company claim the drive supports the SATA DEVSLP standard – great news for laptop lovers. The M5M idles down to 1mW and rescales to 200mW within 100ms.
The other side of the PCB houses two more chips and the 256MB DDR3 DRAM cache, branded Hynix.
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