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Today we are looking at a new mSATA drive from Plextor – the 128GB M5M. Diminutive mSATA drives are without doubt a growing market, adopted in many laptop computers today. As we have seen in recent desktop motherboard reviews on Kitguru many manufacturers are now including a mSATA slot, an ideal solution for a fast boot drive.
Solid State Drive prices have been steadily decreasing in the last year and replacing a mechanical drive is without doubt one of the best upgrades you could contemplate.
We test mSATA drives with an Aleratec MiniPCIe mSATA to SATA SSD Adapter as many of the current desktop motherboards use an mSATA connector which will be limited to SATA 3.0Gbps speeds.
After all, we are here today to test the raw performance of the ADATA XPG SX300, not a motherboard connector.
Plextor rate their M5M specifications are up to 540MB/s read and 320MB/s write. The larger 256GB model gets a speed boost with write speeds rated up to 430 MB/s.
One of the main talking points will be the very competitive price – only £93.74 inc vat from SCAN.
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