Today we look at the new Plextor M6 Pro 256GB Solid State Drive. This drive is their new flagship product shipping in a stunning looking rose gold aluminum chassis. Inside Plextor are using Toshiba A19nm MLC flash NAND and the excellent Marvell 88SS9187 controller.
The M6 Pro is the successor to the high end M5 Pro series drive. Plextor are using A19nm Toshiba toggle NAND flash and the multi core Marvell 9187 controller with a custom tweaked, in house firmware. The company say it is their first drive to survive the Plextor new ultra strict, enterprise grade, Zero Error standard of 1008 hours. It is backed by a full 5 year warranty with an MTBF rated at 2.4 million hours.
Plextor have created their own caching software and bundle it with the drive – they call it ‘PlexTurbo'. It uses some system ram as an ‘ultra smart RAM cache' to ‘bypass the limitations of the 6Gb/s SATA III interface.' We look at the PlexTurbo caching system later in the review to see how it performs.
Plextor M6 PRO | 128GB | 256GB | 512GB | 1TB |
Max Read (Sequential MB/s) | 545 | 545 | 545 | 545 |
Max Write (Sequential MB/s) | 330 | 490 | 490 | 490 |
Max Random Read – 4K IOPS | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 |
Max Random Write – 4K IOPS | 82,000 | 86,000 | 88,000 | 88,000 |
Plextor are releasing four flavours of the M6 Pro – in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities. The 128GB drive suffers a little in regards to maximum sequential write speeds – peaking at 330 MB/s when all others are close to 500MB/s. All of the drives seem to deliver very high IOPS performance with ratings up to 100,000 in a 4k random test.
How does the faked ~4000MB/sec speed actually compare to a 4000MB/sec PCIe NVMe drive?
Why wouldn’t you not use the turbo mode all of the time, and then wipe out the competition?
Show me an NVMe SSD that uses more than 4 lanes (32Gbit)
Havent seen any yet.
I’d be interested to see plexturbo run on an X99 with quad channel DDR4…cough.
That 4000MB/s is not the actual speed of the M6 Pro. It’s the system’s memory. Meanwhile the speeds in PCIE based SSD’s are really their raw performance speed. Here’s another review: http://thepcenthusiast.com/plextor-m6-pro-ssd-256gb-review/