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The Plextor M6e PCI Express 512GB SSD has certainly left a positive impression after many days of stress testing. A substantial portion of the enthusiast userbase have been wary of adopting a PCI Express drive as many we have reviewed in the past have required messy driver installs and firmware updates.
The Plextor M6e PCI Express is one of the easiest high performance solid state drives to install. Simply plug into a free PCI Express slot and start the system … it proved that simple to get going. In Windows 7 the M6e was immediately detected and it mounted as an F drive with 476GB of data storage available.
If you want to use the M6e as a boot drive, restart, insert your Windows install disc and install, just as you would if you were installing the operating system on a SATA connected Solid State Drive. No need to locate drivers for the Windows system disc to detect the M6E.
There is no doubt that the combination of Marvell 88SS9183 flash controller and 19nm Toshiba Toggle NAND flash memory chips is potent. Performance with both incompressible and compressible data was class leading and the Plextor M6e rated at the top of our charts, throughout the review.
Sequential performance is excellent, peaking at 770 MB/s read and 690 MB/s write, well beyond the technical limitations of the SATA 6Gbps interface. IOPS performance is also noteworthy with the drive producing a 98,000 4k random read result. If you have demands for this drive in corporate database intensive environments, then it will noteably outperform the majority of Solid State Drives we have reviewed in the last year.
Previously PCIe based Solid State storage solutions have been prohibitively priced, alienating a large segment of the potential audience. Before going to press Plextor informed us that the 512GB version of the M6e will cost only 82 pence per gigabyte. Retail price will be £419 for the 512GB unit we reviewed today. If this is too rich for your blood, then the 256GB drive will cost £215, and the 128GB drive will cost £132.
If you want an ultra fast boot drive, or desire greater performance than the current batch of SATA 3 drives can deliver then we feel the Plextor M6e PCI Express 512GB SSD deserves some serious consideration.
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Pros:
- Breaks the SATA 3 bandwidth bottleneck of 600 MB/s
- IOPS performance.
- no drivers, simply plug and play.
- excellent boot drive option.
- Ideal for a boot drive or large storage drive for video editing.
- equally good with compressible and incompressible data.
- frees more SATA ports for storage.
Cons:
- May not be suitable for people with multiple video cards.
Kitguru says: Extremely high performance, and at 82p per GB it offers good value for money too.
Well I am glad to see this, I had a revodrive for 4 months and it was the most unreliable piece of crap I have ever owned. OCZ went out of business for a reason 🙁 This seems well priced too. watching for a store link!
Its a good price really, If you want this performance you need to RAID 0 two budget 256GB drives, lose 2 SATA ports – which I would rather have for my mechanical storage drives. I like it.
The article states the test was performed on an Asus P8P67 Deluxe motherboard, but the one depicted is a Maximums VI. Could you clarify which platform it was?
Apologies John, there was a paragraph of text which should not have been there on the methodology page. it was tested on the Maximus, the Kitguru Test rig, which is sold by PCSPECIALIST. (same as the image shown).
Thanks for the super-speedy answer Zardon, and for the clarification. Was wondering if an older platform would constrain the performance or distort possible expected performance for end users, glad to see that was not the case. Much appreciated.
Apologies for what might be a silly question, would it be worth it price-wise if I got a low end SSD and held out for SATA Express or got one of these and kept it for a while after SATA Express came out, would it be worth it and would the performance be okay even after?
Hi Richard, it all depends on how much you want to spend. A low end SSD right now is very inexpensive, whereas this M6e will be more expensive. As we said, the M6e is faster than any SSD you can get right now, due to limitations of the SATA interface. To be honest however, most people would be happy with a standard, cost effective SSD running via a SATA 6Gbps port.
I’m bottlenecking at the moment on a mechanical hard drive, I think I’ll get a mid range SSD and wait for SATA Express but maybe something will happen through the year. Thanks for the fast response 🙂