Plextor M6e 256GB SSD review

Introduction

Plextor is first to the market with a native PCI-Express SSD for desktop PC's.It will not come as a surprise to our regular readers that the Serial ATA 600 interface has been the bottleneck for SSD performance for some time now. The maximum throughput of 600MB/Sec (550 MB/sec in real life applications) is being achieved by virtually every SSD of the latest generations. The small differences that are still there are mainly down to random read and write perfomance and thesteady state performance between the different drives.

Luckily there is a solution to the SATA 600 bottleneck, the PCI-Express bus. The PCI-EXpress bus is also very suitable for storage, and as PCI-E offers 500MB/s per lane speed can be 2GB/sec when combining 4 lanes. There are already a few different form factors to use PCI-Express SSD's in PC's, laptops have the  M.2 standard (also known as NGFF), the sucessor to mSATA. These SSD's can be used with either the SATA bus or a PCI-Express x2 bus. For Desktop PC's a SATA Express bus is in development, with which PCI-Express SSD's in 2,5" format will be possible. 

Plextor is the first to use an unorthodox method to up the speed stakes for PC's, and has introduced a M.2 SSD sporting a M.2 to PCI-Express converter. This makes it possible to use the SSD without any problems in a PCI-Express x4 or x16 slot as the controller used is native PC-Express, not a PCI-E to SATA converter. This makes it possible for Plextor to promise transfer speeds of more than 700MB/sec and they can boast to have the first native PCI-Express SSD for consumer PC's.

Plextor M6e: Marvell controller

The M.2-module at the heart of the Plextor M6e is basedon a Marvell 88SS9183 controller, containing a PCI-Express 2.0 x2 interface. The Marvell-controller is combined with Toshiba 19nm MLC ToggleFlash memory. Toshiba has supplied the memory for Plextor's high end SSD's since day one, and more and more SSD manufactorers are following this choice lately. Next to these memory chips we can see a DDR3 bufferchip on the mini SSD, the 256GB we test has a 512MB bufferchip on board.

Even though Plextor has used a PCI-Express x 4 connector for this model nothing is preventing it to be used in a PCI-Express x16 slot. The converter has very little components as it only needs to link the correct points with each other to make it function.The back of the adapter card is nondescript and there are three lights on the end, red for error, green for PCIe X2 travel and the yellow is for drive activity.The M6e M.2 SSD itself contains the Marvell SS9183 controller, Hynix DDR 3 DRAM cache, along with 8 pieces of Toshiba 19nm Toggle Mode NAND flash memory. 

The SSD is native AHCI compatible, the 
protocol that every modern operating system uses to communicate with data storage, This enables the Plextor M6e to be used in any PC that is running Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 or Linux. The AHCI protocol also means that no additional drivers are needed when installing the windows operating system on the drive. It is not clear yet if the new Plextor drive will be able to use the new NVMe protocolin future, but then again none of the currently available SATA SSd drivers will be definitely not be able to use NVMe.

It will not be possible to use several Plextor M6e SSD's in a RAID configuration, except when using a software based RAID in either Windows or Linux. We can not see this as a massive disadvantage as we think it is pretty pointless to place SSD in a RAID configuration for an every day PC. The TRIM command is, as it is also common in SaTA SSD drives, supported in PCI-Express SSD's.

The Plextor Plextool provides information about Plextor SSDs, but more importantly, it is a very convenient utility for  updating firmware, secure erasing, and it also has a diagnostics scan should you feel something might be wrong with your SSD.

Plextor promises read speeds of up to 770MB/sec as well as write speeds of up to 625B/sec, both quite a bit faster than high end SATA 600 drives available now, but at the same time not a mind blowing increase on the current standard. 4k random reads and writes are supposed to be 105.000 and 100.000 Iops.

Next to the 256GB model we tested Plextor will also have a 128Gb and a 512 GB drive available, all should be available at the end of February or beginning of March 2014. below we have listed the recommended retail prices of the new drives, actual prices can obviously differ when the drives will hit the shelves. Plextor provides all the M6 models with a 5 year warranty.