Plextor M6S & M6M (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on April 10, 2014 6:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based—we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we're testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used |
| Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox |
| Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Starcraft 2, BioShock Infinite |
| Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox |
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware |
| Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 |
| Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 |
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we've been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
The IO consistency already hinted that the M6S wouldn't perform very well in The Destoyer and that is indeed the case. The performance is slightly down from the M5 Pro Xtreme and is overall similar to the Crucial M550. Both of these drives have only 7% over-provisioning, which definitely hurts the benchmarks scores as there is unfortunately no way to test with added over-provisioning. It's hard to say how much the scores would improve with 12% over-provisioning but Toshiba (the Strontium Hawk is a rebranded Toshiba drive with a Marvell controller) is able to achieve more than twice the performance without any added over-provisioning, so there should certainly be room for improvement even without touching the over-provisioning.
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nick2crete - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Christian ,the Crucial M550 has the Marvell 9189 controller ,so what are the differences from 9187,9188 and 9189
Kristian Vättö - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
9189 is an updated version of the 9187 with full DevSleep and LPDDR support.9188 is a light version of the 9187 with four channels instead of eight.
nick2crete - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
Thank you !maybe you should correct it in the review ,because as it is written is meant that the M550 has the 9187 or you meant the M500 probably ..
HisDivineOrder - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
The main reason to release a derivative product is because "the other guys" are releasing new products and you don't want to seem behind.AKA AMD re-releasing the 7xxx series as R9 parts with new branding and new "newness." nVidia, Intel, they all do it. In fact, Intel's about to do it again.
payton2037 - Sunday, April 13, 2014 - link
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watersb - Monday, April 14, 2014 - link
Fantastic overview of NAND drive internals. Bundle this up as an Amazon Single for $1.99 and take my money.AbRASiON - Wednesday, April 16, 2014 - link
Would I be right in assuming when the author writes "manufacturers are preparing for the PCI-e era" regarding SSD storage, we're looking at that NGFF or whatever it is, next gen mSATA port? I mean surely they don't expect us to blow a PCI-e port on storage? (I would if it was worth it, most wouldn't)Antronman - Monday, April 21, 2014 - link
PCIe storage already exists at the consumer level...Extremely expensive, 1.4TB Read 700MB Write PCIe SSDs.
420GB, 1500USD.
Ultraspark - Thursday, April 24, 2014 - link
On Amazon Plextor m5p 128gb cost about 117$, and not 200$. I wonder how did you found such price. Or on newegg prices are updated once per 2 year, or this is an cheap review "paid" by someone to put Plextor in a bad light. It is well known that the controller+memory tandem is a half job. The firmware do the other half of job. You'll never feel in real life few tens of Mbps or few thousands of IOPS. The main goal of plextor is reliability! Just remember the Sandforce devices with shitty firmware who die like no one else. The MxS series is a preparation for MxP series. Remember the new revision of M5S. It is almost M5P with very small difference, without a chance to feel that difference in real life. Just different firmware and case. So, let's be honest dear reviwer: a good car is just a half job. If you want to win you need a good driver. The same is with plextor. This is 1st firmware. It is just to work. The future firmwares will do the magic, like on M5 Series. And When you search for price, be honest to search for lowest, not for highest. Please correct from 200$ to 117$Ultraspark - Thursday, April 24, 2014 - link
Or change the supplier. I never buy from newegg.