Plextor M5 Pro 256GB SSD review

Some companies make a real song and dance about the launch of a new product, others just seem to launch something without hardly making a ripple. Plextor sits firmly in the latter category, which is something of a surprise considering its latest Pro SSD range, the M5 series, features not one but two new technologies that are, …

[Anonymous Coward]

Supercap?

[Fuzz]

£238?

The Samsung 830 and the crucial M4 are both almost as fast and they can be had for around £130 why pay this much

[Prof Denzil Dexter]

Re: £238?

I concur. the mythical £1 per gig limit has long been bettered, and to make SSD's mainstream, the price needs to be a lot closer to spinny plate prices.

Nice to see a decent warranty for once though, i'll give them that.

[Piro]

Re: £238?

People need to take this advice and start buying up Samsung 830s - the 840 is far, far less durable, and the 840 Pro will be more expensive. The 830 256GB is the sweet spot for SSDs.

[Dave 126]

Re: £238?

The price we've seen in the article is the suggested price, and you're comparing to what something else 'can be had for'.

The real retail price of many products is usually lower, and often gets lower still during its time on the market, than its suggested at launch. As always, people will compare the speed, features, warranty etc against the price as and when they're ready to buy one.

[Richard Jukes]

Because...

Because its Plextor....

From what I remember of Plextor (from the era of CD Rewriters) was that they made bloody good kit. I could of course be wrong now a days, but I would be tempted to pay a premium for quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Because...

Plextor do not make the flash chips or the controllers - personally I would rather trust someone like Intel or Samsung who do.

[Dale 3]

And yet

still no mention of power consumption.

[Anonymous Coward]

Supercap? I'd imagine an SSD without one could / will suffer data loss if an unexpected power cut occurred yet very few SSDs include this feature?

[Richard Lloyd]

Speeds no better than Sandforce

I've got 240GB Corsair and Intel SSDs using Sandforce controllers that actually post slightly higher read speeds and much higher write speeds than this Plextor, so where's the excitement about this release (especially since it's nowhere near the 50p per GB that entry-level SSDs are now at)?

What I'm concerned about is: where is SATA 4? I can't find a word about it on the Web and the SSD speeds are almost at the limits of SATA 3 (a fact that's seemingly lost on all the journos out there). Yes, if they were cheap enough, you'd be RAIDing them for more speed (but you lose TRIM then, hmmmm...), but I want a single decent capacity drive to exceed 600 Mbytes/sec in the next 1-2 years otherwise I won't be buying any more SSDs for quite a while. I guess PCI express cards would be the way to go, but they seem to have a massive price premium over SATA 3 SSDs at the moment.

[Steve Knox]

Re: Speeds no better than Sandforce

I want a single decent capacity drive to exceed 600 Mbytes/sec..

For what? That's almost two and a half fully uncompressed 1080p video streams. At that speed you could overwrite the entire drive in about 7 minutes.

I'd much rather SSD manufacturers concentrate on making them more affordable and reliable than faster at this point..

[Chris 228]

I like this SSD

I purchased and installed a 128 GB. M5 Pro in an older laptop and it is a nice improvement in speed in a slow laptop.